Character

Jun 13, 2019 — Photo by Sara Driver Half a century ago, George A. Romero’s midnight-movie hit Night of the Living Dead invented the zombie genre as we know it and turned American independent filmmaking on its head. Made on an ultralow budget with...

Jun 12, 2019 — One Scene One of the most talked-about movies at this year’s Sundance, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is both a rhapsodic portrait of first-time director Joe Talbot’s native city and a mournful look at how gentrification, income inequality,...

Jun 11, 2019 — The problem with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, everyone agrees, is that there is never enough dancing. You have to wait through often silly plots and hit-or-miss comedy for the musical numbers that are the whole point. But the dances...

Jun 7, 2019 — He is the most disarming and self-effacing of the English actors who dominated stage and screen in the middle of the twentieth century—the others were John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, and Laurence Olivier. Those fellows carried themselves like grand...

Jun 5, 2019 — No filmmaker blazed more trails than Dorothy Arzner. In 1928, after making a handful of silents, Arzner became the first woman to direct a Hollywood sound film (Manhattan Cocktail), and a decade later she joined the Directors Guild of America...

Jun 4, 2019 — The great Hollywood portrait photographs are like close-ups that never end. Cinema is an art of faces, and the chance to gaze at them, to get lost in them, may be the deepest thrill movies offer. In the darkness of...

May 31, 2019 — Chinese poets and American and English novelists figure prominently in this week’s round.

May 30, 2019 — The star of classics directed by Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Kinugasa, Ozu, Ichikawa, and Teshigahara was ninety-five.

May 29, 2019 — Once again, Lav Diaz and Takashi Miike did what they do; but the Fortnight also showcased a wide range of promising talent.

May 29, 2019 — In Anna Biller’s vibrantly colored fantasias, there’s not a glimmer of a sequin that hasn’t been envisioned by the artist herself. A writer, director, actor, producer, editor, composer, costume and production designer, and set decorator, she’s a one-woman studio, building...