A Way Out

Oct 2, 2018 — Performances There’s an irreducible reserve about Kristen Stewart, an appearance of not doing much on-screen, that I mistook for lack of talent when I first saw her mumbling into her shirt in the Twilight franchise. Still, playing Bella Swan, chastity...

Sep 28, 2018 — This week’s round also includes David Bordwell on Alain Resnais and Sergei Loznitsa’s tribute to Kira Muratova.

Sep 11, 2018 — There is a brief, nearly throwaway scene early in Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water (1994) that testifies to the transcultural power of rock and roll. In an apartment outside Paris in 1972, we see two teenage brothers wrestling over a portable...

Sep 4, 2018 — Natalie Portman sings, Willem Dafoe paints, and Frederick Wiseman heads to Trump country.

Aug 26, 2018 — Tomás Gutiérrez Alea brought cinema to the center of Cuban society with this richly ambiguous portrait of postrevolutionary Havana.

Aug 5, 2018 — The writer-director of Monsoon Wedding and Salaam Bombay! takes us through an eclectic mix of favorite films, including works by Jane Campion, Lars von Trier, and Satyajit Ray.

Jul 20, 2018 — American audiences weren’t ready for Barbara Loden’s Wanda when it premiered in 1970. A stark portrait of a working-class woman (played with raw conviction by Loden herself) who breaks free of a miserable marriage, only to find herself on the...

Jul 16, 2018 — In this essay originally published in the New Yorker, Roger Angell hails Ron Shelton’s comic ode to baseball as one of the few movies to capture the essence of the sport.

Jul 16, 2018 — Burning Secret would have been an adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s 1913 novella.

Jul 10, 2018 — The martial-arts film was never the same after King Hu got his hands on it, reinventing the genre with subtle editing and dazzling choreography.