Films of 2016

Lampedusa's Lost Souls

Gianfranco Rosi’s haunting documentary Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) bears eloquent witness to the urgent human drama of migrants and refugees landing on the shores of Lampedusa, in southern Italy.

February 7, 2017

Iran: A Private Agony

Between the lines of Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman is a malignant subtext about Iranian society, which, despite the uneven entry of egalitarian values, remains wedded to old-fashioned honor codes.

January 25, 2017

Cairo Without End

Floating between fiction and autobiography, Egyptian filmmaker Tamer El Said’s first film, In the Last Days of the City, captures the continuities between the decades preceding the 2011 revolution, and the stark reality that has emerged since.

January 17, 2017

When They Came from Another World

What if the future is as real as the past?

January 19, 2017 issue

Prankster and Daughter

Maren Ade’s deadpan comic masterpiece Toni Erdmann, about an estranged father and daughter, has nothing in common with the usual holiday heartstring-tuggers, and it’s not only because Ade resists all the obvious and familiar ways in which a familial accord can be brokered.

December 22, 2016

The Limits of Forgiveness

The friend who urged me to see Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea told me that it was the only film she’d been able to watch since the election, the only work of art that had, even briefly, distracted her from her worry about the future of our democracy.

December 15, 2016

The Case of O.J. Simpson

Ezra Edelman’s ESPN documentary ‘O.J.: Made in America’

October 27, 2016 issue

Auschwitz on Trial

Mick Jackson’s new film Denial tells the story of the 2000 trial between British Holocaust denier David Irving and American academic Deborah E. Lipstadt.

September 28, 2016

The Sorcerer of Jazz

What gave Miles Davis’s music its cohesion, even its identity, was his unforgettable sound

September 29, 2016 issue

US Cyber Weapons: Our ‘Demon Pinball’

September 29, 2016 issue

The Diva of Delusion

Oblivious to the fact that she was considered by experts to be the world’s worst classical singer, Florence Foster Jenkins bulldozed her way to a legendary, self-financed 1944 Carnegie Hall recital.

August 26, 2016

Weiner!

A film about imperfection in all its human glory

July 14, 2016 issue

Unserious Austen

Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship is a Jane Austen novel transformed into cinema, but it’s also a film that has allowed itself to be contaminated by literature. And that is the rarer, and greater, achievement.

May 27, 2016

China's Breakthrough Film

Kaili Blues, an eccentric, remarkably assured first feature by the young Chinese director Bi Gan, seems primarily concerned with developing a film language that treats memory as a tangible thing.

May 19, 2016

A Darker Jungle

The new special-effects-driven The Jungle Book film from Walt Disney Pictures is a remake, of course, but a remake of what exactly?

April 26, 2016

Somnolent Thailand

Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film Cemetery of Splendor, the most nakedly political film of Weerasethakul’s career, is a gentle, open-hearted story of human connection, underlain at every moment by rage and dread.

March 13, 2016

The Drone Dilemma

When is it justified to kill without hearing or trial? How are the lives of the innocent to be weighed in the balance? To its credit, the new film Eye in the Sky refuses to offer any easy answers.

March 10, 2016

The Passion of the Coens

With Hail, Caesar!, the Coen brothers offer the latest chapter in their ongoing exploration of how we live, or try to live, in the presence or absence of the divine.

February 13, 2016

Gomes's Impossible Movie

Director Miguel Gomes has always enjoyed combining two separate elements in a single film, and in Arabian Nights this technique is cosmically expanded.

February 3, 2016