Mar 23, 2021 — “Pleasure,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, “is a safer guide than either right or duty.” Surely this is true when it comes to watching films. While cinema can be edifying, most of us go to the...

Jan 30, 2023 — Celebrate Black History Month with a collection of films that survey African American history on-screen, a look at literary legend James Baldwin’s cinematic legacy, and a retrospective devoted to the independent trailblazer Oscar Micheaux.

Sep 30, 2022 — We’re reading interviews with Garret Bradley and Don Hertzfeldt and a marvelous account of the making of Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).

Oct 12, 2010 — This essay originally appeared in the October 1990 issue of Cahiers du cinéma. Translated by Stephen Sarrazin. The Magician is one of Bergman’s most enigmatic films, perhaps his underground masterpiece, one of the keys to his cinema. Traveling actors, maids...

Jul 14, 2016 — On what would have been the director’s ninety-eighth birthday, we revisit a selection of essays, photo galleries, and videos that explore his iconic oeuvre.

Jun 7, 2018 — “Film was a sort of rarified, special thing you might luck into,” says Marlon James, recalling his first encounters with the art form as a child in Jamaica. Growing up in Kingston in the 1970s, he got his cinema education...

Feb 26, 2020 — Karel Zeman belonged to an obsessive fringe fellowship of moviemakers that stretched right back to the medium’s first formative days—a lineage of auteurs who believed in cinema as a full-blown daydream machine, capable of realizing inhabitable fantasias. These were filmmakers—practical-effects...

Jun 22, 2015 — Terry Gilliam touches down in the real world for the first time with this fanciful tale of blurred class boundaries in New York City.

Mar 27, 2012 — Noël Coward and David Lean created a patriotic diptych with their first two films: In Which We Serve, from 1942, about the bravery and sacrifice of British sailors and those who love them, and the 1944 This Happy Breed, on...

May 28, 2019 — Songbook Some songs are so beautiful that it takes six or seven or fifty listens before you really hear the words. High on the list of the greatest American songwriters, Jerome Kern crafted many such melodies: perfect enough to momentarily...