How a Comedy Central docuseries hosted by an unassuming weirdo rode a tidal wave of scams straight into the pantheon of the decade’s strangest and most significant art. Read More
Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels is a tragi-comic noir about criminals who break their own hearts trying to find themselves and connect to others. Read More
I was wrong about so many things in 2014. I was wrong about Gone Girl. And, most significantly, I was wrong about my gender. Read More
How do we define a new masculinity that encourages men to engage emotionally with the world and with themselves? How do we teach men to ask for help, and how will society offer it? Read More
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence features mismatched animation styles, non sequitur montages, a sphinxlike plot presentation, and bulky meditations on the nature of reality. But such committed excessiveness, for this viewer, makes Innocence my favorite kind of film: powerful in its earnestness, and captivating in its thoughtful defiance. Read More
Fargo is an outlier in the world of neo-noir, protecting its heroes by ending their stories and defiantly leaving their purity intact as though to prove that happy endings are possible. Read More
It’s hard to absorb Black Widow if one is unprepared to see women as people. But once the audience understands that the relationship between these women powers the film—not their relationships with the men around them—its true quality becomes evident. Read More
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Featured Essays
Ain’t Them Bodies Saints manages to simultaneously suggest a vernacular, a presence, and a mythos Read More
Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, unlike most films, is not an escape. Read More
Throughout their body of work, Powell and Pressburger return to the question of whether life and art can co-exist, and if the urge to live or the urge to create will win out in the end. Read More
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Martin Scorsese's Conjuring the Rolling Thunder Revue is the life story of the Bob Dylan who mysteriously reemerged onto the Greenwich Village scene of 1975. Or, at least, it’s a story of that Bob Dylan. Read More
In 1972, with his film career dried up and few options available, Tab Hunter took a role in the Roger Corman-produced, Curtis Hanson-directed Sweet Kill—a shameless exploitation-flick ripoff of Psycho—and fashioned himself into a monstrous queer. Read More
The truth is, no one knows what the truth is. Read More
From the archives
2013-2019
Here is what happens when you let the darkness win. Read More
In each film, by the end, you feel you know the character’s fears, their monstrous wants and needs—and the ways they fight the snowballing desire within. Read More
24 July 2006 “Small, over-tired children demand to be taken home by their mums once the full-on racket of Glosoli starts to shake the rafters, maybe to return nightmarishly in their troubled sleep later on. Some little girls aged maybe seven or eight ponder why the funny man is screaming some... Read More
The Heartbreak Kid as Elaine May’s Master Class. Read More
For all of A New Leaf's atonal humor and surrealism, Elaine May still manages to depict marriage in a bleakly true light: as a continual, if cordial, blind date. Read More
From the moment that Ishtar—a big budget comedy combining the talents of Elaine May, Warren Beatty, and Dustin Hoffman—was announced, its legend has loomed large. Read More
George Cukor's Holiday understands that money itself isn’t some darkly moral force in the world—the relentless pressure to produce is. Read More
In 1972, with his film career dried up and few options available, Tab Hunter took a role in the Roger Corman-produced, Curtis Hanson-directed Sweet Kill—a shameless exploitation-flick ripoff of Psycho—and fashioned himself into a monstrous queer. Read More
Fran Hoepfner on The Irishman, Uncut Gems, Marriage Story, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Parasite, First Cow, and other highlights (and not so highlights) from the New York Film Festival. Read More
Amber Schaefer’s It's Been Too Long is the erotic parody we need and deserve in 2019. Read More
Contradicting the potential indignity of playing paper thin villains in swishy gowns and opalescent fabrics, there is possibly nothing more dignified in the mind of a young person than a fancy looking woman with a contemptuous laugh and a trim outfit. Read More
Death in Venice remains a tantalizing, sobering piece of work, with hazy morals that have disturbed and fascinated through its 107 years. Read More
Relocating care and running through the invisible world in Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy. Read More
Important news for our subscribers - we're switching to a new paywall provider early next month. Read this to find out what that means for your subscription. Read More
Martin Scorsese's Conjuring the Rolling Thunder Revue is the life story of the Bob Dylan who mysteriously reemerged onto the Greenwich Village scene of 1975. Or, at least, it’s a story of that Bob Dylan. Read More
Richard Linklater's Before Midnight is preoccupied with the ways in which both the past and future seem to manifest themselves in the present. Read More
"Genius is a word that’s thrown around a lot, but I think whatever it means, if Elaine May is not a brilliant improviser, nobody is. If Elaine May is not a brilliant actress, nobody is. If she’s not a brilliant writer, nobody is. If she’s not a brilliant director, nobody is. So whatever that word means, you can apply it to her in four different categories at least, and probably more." Read More
On Elaine May’s discarded women in A New Leaf and The Waverly Gallery. Read More