The Stories

Feb 11, 2025 — Jean-Luc Godard’s first English-language narrative feature is a postapocalyptic fantasy that shifts from antic humor to tragic grandeur while challenging deep-rooted assumptions about what a Shakespearean movie should be.

Aug 12, 2024 — The great actor creates an unforgettable portrait of a man worn down by the world in Tamara Jenkins’s darkly funny and deeply moving family drama.

Nov 20, 2023 — This month brings new books on Godard and Bergman, novelists moonlighting as film critics, and biographies of Lena Horne and Elizabeth Taylor.

Oct 17, 2023 — I. “Morbid Cinema” On October 10, 1962, there appeared a brief paragraph from the Associated Press: “Tod Browning, eighty-two, who directed scores of movies between 1917 and 1939, is dead. He succumbed Saturday after an illness, and no funeral plans...

Aug 10, 2023 — “You’re the company I waited so long for,” Dr. Rosetta Stone (Tilda Swinton) says to her three Self Replicating Automatons in Teknolust (2002), artist Lynn Hershman Leeson’s sci-fi farce about a scientist’s well-meaning pursuit of artificial life. Stone’s color-coded clones...

May 9, 2022 — Waters has written his first novel, and a collection of Mueller’s writing has just been reissued.

Apr 6, 2022 — A playfully philosophical drama, My American Uncle has been largely forgotten, yet it is the most down-to-earth of the French master’s exhilarating engagements with modernist aesthetics.

Oct 13, 2021 — 1. In spite of Melvin Van Peebles’s well-earned reputation for being a provocateur and a disrupter, he was also known for his kindness and generosity toward others. Over the course of working on the Essential Films box set, I observed...

Aug 3, 2021 — With two short films and his acclaimed debut feature, No Data Plan, now playing on the Criterion Channel, the Filipino American filmmaker discusses his vision of the immigrant experience.

Jul 19, 2021 — When Dennis Lehane joked in 2011 that the only real difference between Greek tragedy and noir was that in the former characters fall from great heights and in the latter they drop from the curb, he was pinpointing something simultaneously...