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

Kevin Power

The Kitsch Abyss

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest puts all its faith in cinematic technique and forfeits much of the meaning in Martin Amis’s 2014 novel.

July 18, 2024 issue

J. Hoberman

Polish Compassion

Green Border is the filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s latest confrontation with her country’s brutal history.

June 20, 2024

Brian Seibert

‘You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught’

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, once kings of American culture, invented a new kind of musical theater in shows like Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific. But by the time of their final work together, a critical backlash had begun.

June 20, 2024 issue

Mark O’Connell

Neglecting Beckett

James Marsh’s biopic Dance First runs into some predictable problems in adapting the life of a writer, especially one as recognizable as Samuel Beckett.

June 6, 2024 issue

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

More Real Than Life

In Jane Schoenbrun’s films, personal metamorphosis happens on both sides of the screen.

May 4, 2024

Frances Wilson

‘Diabolical Fame’

Composed of rhapsody and opinionation, without shape or chronology, Roger Lewis’s biography of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton tries to get at the strangeness of stardom.

March 21, 2024 issue