Film Critic
Story Stream
A Great Film That Wasn’t November 16, 2023
How I long for a good new movie. I can only watch the good old ones so many times. Rather than wear them out in my mind, I must leave longer and longer gaps between viewings. I have had this yearning for many years now, and it is not often fulfilled....
Critical Cul-de-Sac November 03, 2023
Radical film criticism—from Siegfried Kracauer to André Bazin—was banished to the dustbin of history, dragged down by the decay of the Soviet Union and the rise of cultural fatalism. Today it has reemerged in undead form, as an incessant plumbing of ...
Paul Schrader’s American Carnage November 01, 2023
A young man with his face pressed between the bars, holding a young woman’s hand to his lips: this is how Robert Bresson ends Pickpocket, his 1959 film modeled on Crime & Punishment. For the preceding seventy-five minutes, Martin LaSalle’s Michel has...
Wes Anderson Has Gone Mad May 24, 2023
To the casual observer, Wes Anderson might seem like someone who either refuses to read his own press or has bought into his press to an absurd degree. Those fussy arrangements, symmetric compositions, and precise tracking shots that have become the ...
Taylor Sheridan's Fallen World May 22, 2023
It is the streaming series Yellowstone where America sees its reflection, the struggle between good and evil. Sheridan expects America to be answerable for her sins, showing the reverberations of consequence over the nation’s 400 years. At the very s...
Éric Rohmer after Europe May 17, 2023
Éric Rohmer wasn’t his real name. He was born Maurice Schérer, the name by which his mother knew him her whole life. As far as she was concerned, Maurice was a teacher in a lycée in Paris. She never knew of the existence of Éric Rohmer, nor that her ...
Ian Penman's Fassbinder is a Love Letter to Counterculture May 16, 2023
One day in the mid-’70s on an air force base in “flattest, dullest” Norfolk, England, an African-American airmen shared some of his deep Southern blues records with a young, white English boy named Ian Penman. The meeting was more or less random, occ...
Writers vs. Robots May 15, 2023
Media coverage of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike comes primarily from the business press and the tech press, to the detriment of people who write about movies and television. It’s film critics, after all, who have an emotional, rather than...
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Life in Pieces May 11, 2023
PICTURE THIS: Camera slowly panning across shelves littered with dog-eared paperbacks, soiled scripts, handwritten corrections, framed stills, loose pills. A copy of Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (a book of personal notes on—to?—the la...
Steve McQueen’s ‘Grenfell’ Will Not Look Away April 13, 2023
On two occasions I’ve seen a body dead, or nearly so, and left uncovered on the street. The first was in D.C. near a petrol station in Shaw, home to a mix of middle class Washingtonians. Two or three times I heard from my apartment what my housemate ...
Strange Hope April 07, 2023
In many respects, Showing Up is nothing new for Kelly Reichardt. Michelle Williams plays Lizzie, a struggling artist, in her fourth collaboration with the director. Jon Raymond co-wrote the script, having done so for all but two of Reichardt’s eight ...
And Now Let’s Review … March 17, 2023
That was the first question I heard after The New York Times hired me as a film critic in the final weeks of 1999. A reporter from Variety found my home phone number and gave me a call — the late-20th-century equivalent of sliding into my DMs.It was ...
It's Fine to Be a Snob February 13, 2023
Taste and standards do matter.What is it about grievance? It is, among emotional states, the one we profess to want the least, a gorge-drop into outright failure. Once you’re aggrieved, you’re wronged, and the battle back to a state of rightness is o...
The Cinema House & the World September 06, 2022
To all but a small but tenacious cabal of connoisseurs, the term “film criticism” suggests—if it suggests anything at all—the consumer-guide style typified by the writing of Roger Ebert: brisk, demotic plot summary requiring no breaks to decipher unf...
The Iñárritu Wars Begin Again September 06, 2022
It can be quite a spectacle when critics smell blood in the water, particularly if the one doing the bleeding is one of those artists they (we) love to hate. And so it seems to be the case with Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, the much-garlanded director...
Terence Davies’s Magnificent Benediction June 03, 2022
Siegfried Sassoon drama stunningly merges biopic and autobiography....
