The Set-Up

May 27, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so commonplace that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. Movies, however, reveal this action as more than just the original mode of getting from here to...

May 12, 2020 — In the early 1950s, director John Sturges, then under contract at MGM, read a condensed version of Paul Brickhill’s memoir The Great Escape, which details the mass escape of downed fighter pilots from the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III...

May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...

Apr 22, 2020 — Deep Dives The Forest for the Trees, by German filmmaker Maren Ade, is one of the deepest depictions of loneliness on-screen. After serving as a television producer and shooting two shorts, Ade made this first feature, based on her own...

Apr 20, 2020 — This month sees new books by and about Woody Allen, Miranda July, and Michael Snow as well as fresh translations and collections of criticism.

Mar 27, 2020 — The cost to the Soviet population due to the war with Germany from 1941 to 1945 has not been definitively established; the best-circulated estimate, about twenty-seven million, is thought by some scholars to be low by many millions. Under Joseph...

Jan 24, 2020 — All six feet two of Burt Lancaster is spread out next to Deborah Kerr as they kiss each other on the beach in From Here to Eternity (1953). This is one of the most famous movie love scenes, parodied and copied many...

Jan 21, 2020 — One of the lesser-known films in Godard’s extraordinary run of 1960s masterpieces, this severe, angular thriller was the director’s first foray into the political territory that would prove so essential to his later work.

Jan 17, 2020 — Of all the weird scenes that populate seventies science-fiction cinema, the most bizarre might be in 1971’s The Omega Man. Based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the film imagines a world in which fallout from a distant war has...

Jan 10, 2020 — How do movies work? It’s a question that seems to have been on more than a few minds this week.