The 2014 Oscars

The Music of the Swindle

David O. Russell’s American Hustle slides with such grace through its intrigues, slipping in so many diverting props and devices and walk-ons that you may start to feel you’re being hustled by the film itself.

February 13, 2014

Love Objects

In Spike Jonze’s Her, the casting of youth and beauty is an artistic failure that compromises the film’s larger artistic achievement.

January 16, 2014

Dancing to Nowhere

If Marcello in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita had spent another four decades flitting about the high life of Rome he might have turned into someone like Jep Gambardella, the protagonist of Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza.

January 9, 2014

An Edge of Comedy Everywhere

December 19, 2013 issue

On 'Inside Llewyn Davis'

Llewyn Davis, the folksinger protagonist of the Coen brothers’ new period film, is a creature of the here and now, not of 1961.

December 16, 2013

What We Learned in Tahrir

Jehane Noujaim’s documentary about the Egyptian uprising, The Square, shows how a minority of exceedingly righteous idealists, somewhat privileged, are now fighting a growing majority who increasingly opt for stability over the more ambitious political goals to which the revolution first aspired.

December 11, 2013

'12 Years a Slave'

The best sequences in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave are not history lessons. They are, instead, visually ambiguous and open-ended.

November 5, 2013

Drowning in the Digital Abyss

A survival drama set almost entirely in the unfathomable emptiness of outer space, Gravity is something now quite rare—a truly popular big-budget Hollywood movie with a rich aesthetic pay-off.

October 11, 2013

The Hidden Khmer Rouge

In his documentary The Missing Picture, Rithy Panh uses small clay figurines to reconstruct the grisly reality of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime.

October 8, 2013

Watching Her Drown

How many hours have I spent in the dark, trying to like the films of Woody Allen?

August 15, 2013

Indonesia’s Happy Killers

A trio of Indonesian men, dressed in elaborate cowboy outfits, are pretending to viciously beat a hugely overweight man who is wearing a curly black wig and a bright satin two-piece gown. The men are the subjects of Joshua Oppenheimer’s brilliant documentary, The Act of Killing, and they are filming a collective biopic about what they did during the anti-Communist purges in Indonesia in 1965.

July 18, 2013