Cinema
Story Stream
Almodóvar's Women March 12, 2025
If you are a leading woman in a Pedro Almodóvar film, your life will not be frictionless. You will have a terminal illness. Or if you don’t have one, you will be grieving the one that someone very close to you has. You will be a single mother or moth...
The New Literalism Plaguing Today’s Biggest Movies March 11, 2025
A warrior is in a prison cell. His guard approaches and shows him the wooden sword that he will receive once he has earned his freedom. The warrior grabs it, uses his unlocked cell door to knock the guard down, and places the sword’s tip on the guard...
'The Breakfast Club' at 40 March 10, 2025
One of the most important but largely unsung heroes of the Reagan Era was movie-maker John Hughes. A close friend of P. J. O’Rourke, Hughes wrote, directed, and/or produced a whole slew of movies, including Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, ...
Joan Didion, Movie Critic March 10, 2025
Writing a book about Joan Didion is a good way to discover that many people love her but far fewer people have read much of her work. In the five years since I started working on my book We Tell Ourselves Stories, I’ve surprised a lot of her admirers...
Cinematheque: Seeing and Being March 04, 2025
Is Being fundamentally a state, or an act? Is humanhood something we are, or that we do? For Heidegger, we only exist as relational creatures, embedded in a web of connections, and it is through our attempt to comprehend the nature of those relations...
High Infidelity March 04, 2025
Sunday’s Oscars ceremony was a productive night for The Brutalist, which scooped up the statuettes for cinematography, score, and best actor. Since the film’s release late last year, the deluge of acclaim for Brady Corbet’s epic, three-and-a-half hou...
On 'Joker: Folie à Deux' and 'Megalopolis' March 03, 2025
When I was sixteen, in 1992, I wanted to be a novelist like Stephen King, only better. I wanted the literary prestige of Edgar Allen Poe. I had conceived of this idea for a novel: The River of Lost Time. It was about a deranged criminal who illogical...
The Art of Éric Rohmer February 27, 2025
The filmmaker known as Éric Rohmer was born Maurice Schérer in 1920. For the first half of his life he seemed destined for a career as a minor literary figure. Rohmer’s younger brother René Schérer (1922-2023) succeeded in this, becoming a well-known...
The Novelist of Apocalypse February 26, 2025
The last time I saw László Krasznahorkai, he declared his love for me. Admittedly, he was making a rhetorical point about his singular prose style, and we were speaking in front of an audience at an art gallery, but it still felt good. Krasznahorkai ...
The Noble Savagery of Sam Peckinpah February 20, 2025
In attempting to assess the career of the American director Sam Peckinpah, the centenary of whose birth falls on February 21, 2025, the film critic Rick Moody, writing in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, got no further than the opening sequence of Pecki...
What’s The Point Of Bill Gates? February 18, 2025
I started reading Bill Gates’s new memoir Source Code the day after David Lynch died. In between learning about his pioneering BASIC coding language, I struggled to grasp what Laura Dern was saying in Inland Empire. In many respects, the two couldn’t...
Inside the Dream Factory February 03, 2025
“We’re here because I love this place,” says Steven Soderbergh, pulling up a stool at a snug whiskey bar among the guitar shops off London’s Charing Cross Road. “But we’re also here because I need a drink.”...
The Impossible Object of Queer Desire January 28, 2025
The late British writer Quentin Crisp, despite being one of the first openly homosexual men in England, was lambasted as “homophobic” and “misogynistic” for his self-deprecatory quips about the “perversity” of homosexuality. His lament that gay men a...
Catherine Breillat’s Unsettling Cinema of Desire January 28, 2025
In the French director Catherine Breillat’s film “Fat Girl,” from 2001, two adolescent sisters go on summer holiday with their parents near the seaside....
David Lynch's Cigarette Cinema January 23, 2025
The kitchen of Laura Palmer’s house is dark although it’s morning, and her mother Sarah Palmer is smoking, calling for her daughter to get ready for school. From the dead look on her face, she knows on some instinctive level what is about to happen; ...
Women in Trouble January 23, 2025
The first film David Lynch ever saw, when he was six years old, was a 1952 melodrama by the director Henry King called Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie. Shot in bright orange candlelight and deep nocturnal blues, it offers a prehistory for the kind o...
David Lynch’s Guts January 23, 2025
In David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, college student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) discovers that he’s both a detective and a pervert. The lengthy, disturbing sequence—involving Jeffrey as a Peeping Tom who witnesses a rape—contributed to the controver...
When David Lynch Played It Straight January 22, 2025
Early on in The Straight Story, the 1999 drama that David Lynch called his “most experimental film,” a doctor tells 73-year-old Alvin Straight that he likely has emphysema and that if he doesn’t make some lifestyle changes, there will be consequences...
The Unsettling Genius of David Lynch January 21, 2025
In trying to write on David Lynch one begins to understand why words did not come easily to him. In a beloved clip of the surrealist filmmaker, who died this week at 78, an interviewer asked him to “elaborate” on his statement that Eraserhead is his ...
Ridley Scott Is Not Looking Back January 16, 2025
On a bookcase in the London offices of Ridley Scott Associates sits a framed memento: a Pupil’s Report Book from the County of Durham Education Committee’s Stockton Grammar School. On the front cover, filled in by hand, is the name of the pupil in qu...
Pasolini and the Permanent Present January 16, 2025
One of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s remarkable early accomplishments was the long poem that lent its title to his 1961 collection of poetry, La Religione del mio tempo, or “The Religion of My Time.” And while religion was many things to Pasolini, what he wa...
The Enigmatic Artistry of Terrence Malick January 15, 2025
Biographies of great artists are of inherent interest, but in the case of Terrence Malick, one of the greatest living filmmakers, there’s an extra fascination because of the great question mark that looms over his career: the twenty-year gap between ...
Is Anyone Shocked by 'Babygirl'? January 13, 2025
Not since Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut has a female movie star offered such an awkward portrayal of sex as Nicole Kidman in Babygirl. The movie is meant to be daring, a Last Tango in Paris for our time, but its essential premise would work in a Do...
The Storytelling of Clint Eastwood January 13, 2025
Clint Eastwood is an unstoppable force. An actor and a director who has been building his career since his first appearance on screen in 1955, Eastwood, now 94 years old, has directed and produced a new film. Juror #2 was released in November, and li...
Car Trouble January 07, 2025
Hollywood has always been addicted to remakes, re-imaginings and straightforward rip-offs of existing films. Sometimes, this can be hugely successful, as the lucrative release of Wicked has proved. At other times, however, it seems nothing more than ...
