Arts

Film & Television

As Long as You Both Shall Live

Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall explores the various fictions a mother and son must tell themselves and each other when their visions of life diverge.

April 18, 2024 issue

James Quandt

An Anatolian Chekhov

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest film, About Dry Grasses, combines the painterly images, frustrated characters, and existential spirit of his earlier work.

April 4, 2024 issue

Dennis Zhou

Filming and Forgetting Taipei

Edward Yang’s films approach Taiwan’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy through everyday stories of love, work, and family.

March 7, 2024 issue

J. Hoberman

Outsider’s Outsider

At once famous and obscure, marginal and central, Harry Smith anticipated and even invented several important elements of Sixties counterculture.

March 21, 2024 issue

Daphne Merkin

The Way She Was

“I never thought I was great,” Barbra Streisand writes in her capacious memoir, but the truth seems to be that for a large part of her life she has flirted with the possibility that she was.

April 4, 2024 issue

Lauren Michele Jackson

Tired of Pink

The original Mean Girls documented a widespread angst about the perils of “Girl World.” What happens when we keep bringing it back?

February 10, 2024

A. S. Hamrah

Objects in Space at a Moment in Time

Michael Mann’s biopic of Enzo Ferrari is suffused with a sense of death and loss.

February 3, 2024

Willa Glickman

How To Film A City

In his series for HBO, John Wilson obsessively catalogued footage of New York and its oddballs.

January 10, 2024

And the Oscar Goes to…

Darryl Pinckney

Moon Over Miami

Barry Jenkins’s film Moonlight isn’t trying to be realistic about anything, even as it confounds what we expect from stories about young black men, starting with the film’s texture, its intricate soundtrack, tantric pace, and beauty frame by frame.

April 20, 2017 issue

Michael Keaton as Riggan Thomson in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, 2014

Francine Prose

Birdman’s Comic Horror

Birdman charges forward, headlong and without stopping, alternately scourging and exalting its audience with the genuine pain and the holy-fool ridiculousness of a “washed-up” former superhero.

January 28, 2015

John K. Fairbank

Born Too Late

The Last Emperor is a spectacular film photographed in brilliant color. It is also a moral drama with controversial political overtones of great ambiguity.

February 18, 1988 issue

Jason Epstein

A Dissent on ‘Schindler’s List’

Oskar Schindler was an exotic exception, and Stephen Spielberg lets viewers take comfort in his virtuous behavior, but the Holocaust raises terrible questions about humanity, and it is these questions that the director did not ask.

April 21, 1994 issue

Robert Craft

B-flat Movie

To give Amadeus every benefit of the doubt, we might assume that the presentation of Mozart as a fool is an intended irony, and congratulate the director for having chosen the best way to fail with an insoluble problem.

April 11, 1985 issue

Joan Didion

Letter from ‘Manhattan’

The characters in Manhattan and Annie Hall and Interiors are, with one exception, presented as adults, but their concerns and conversations are those of clever children acting out a yearbook fantasy of adult life.

August 16, 1979 issue

The Latest

Beatrice Loayza

‘The Look of Shame’

The French director Catherine Breillat has spent her career insisting on women’s agency and reclaiming taboo desires—sometimes with troubling implications.

November 21, 2024

Patricia J. Williams

Torn Apart

Errol Morris’s new documentary looks unflinchingly at the horrors of Donald Trump’s policy of separating families at the border.

December 5, 2024 issue

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

I, Coppola

Megalopolis, the director’s first film in thirteen years, is a useful reminder of how inimical extreme wealth is to democratic thinking—and to clear thinking in general.

November 3, 2024

Anna Shechtman and D. A. Miller

Anora’s Honor

The title character in Sean Baker’s new film is sharp-tongued and invulnerable—until a marriage plot catches up with her.

November 1, 2024

A. S. Hamrah

You’re Brutal, I’m Brutal

With its sympathetic portraits of Donald Trump and Roy Cohn, The Apprentice is, in the end, yet another bland Hollywood biopic.

November 21, 2024 issue

J. Hoberman

The Beatles Effect

A new documentary treats the Fab Four’s Shea Stadium concert as a window into the dreams and nightmares of the summer of 1965.

October 12, 2024

Andrew Katzenstein

Fools in Love

Screwball comedies are among the most beloved films of Hollywood’s golden age, but for decades historians and critics have disagreed over what the genre is and which movies belong to it.

September 19, 2024 issue

J. W. McCormack

‘An Ass-Backward Sherlock Holmes’

Over seven seasons on NBC, Columbo put a charming, shambolic gloss on the crime show. Now it has a new generation of imitators.

August 25, 2024

Lucy Jakub

Be Yourself

In her debut film, Janet Planet, the playwright Annie Baker tells a story about how to live when you don’t know why living is so hard.

August 11, 2024

Leanne Shapton

Crossing to Safety

Diana Nyad has an astonishing ability to do unfathomably difficult, even terrifying athletic feats, and, like many athletes, she did them in the aftermath of abuse.

August 15, 2024 issue