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
Now Playing
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
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
New Releases, Interviews, Festivals and More
Featured Essays
All the President’s Men evokes a quiet, pervasive anguish. Read More
Two years into my struggle with mental illness, I discovered The Virgin Suicides. While a team of psychiatrists struggled to diagnose me, and my school struggled to teach me, a movie was helping me make sense of my mind. Read More
A quartet of true "Acid Westerns" (El Topo, Zachariah, Greaser's Palace, and Dead Man) wrestle with and adapt religious traditions, synthesizing the spirit of the Wild West with the spirit of 1960s psychedelic culture. Read More
So prominent is the problem of whether and how to explain Mulholland Drive, that nearly any attempt to interpret the film ends up using the film to debate interpretation. 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
Mikey and Nicky is not the story of two men attempting to escape the mob, nor two men reckoning with themselves—it's the story of two boys wholly unequipped to mediate the complex emotions and responsibilities of male adulthood. Read More
What does it mean to look at women through the eyes of a male protagonist in the three films Elaine May directed in the '70s? 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
The Heartbreak Kid as Elaine May’s Master Class. Read More
I love difficult women. I like ladies who talk back with abandon, the ones who don’t give in without a fight, the headstrong, selfish broads with hearts of gold. Read More
We'll never use your email for any purpose other than emailing about Bright Wall/Dark Room, and guarantee that it won't be shared with third parties.
From the archives
2013-2019
It’s always felt like Ghibli movies understood what it meant to grow up as a girl, still unconvinced by the world that she has to fight for everything she has. Read More
By the end of the season I’m feeling not quite blue, but maybe a little silver, and I want to nestle into remembering that there is a fine tomorrow on its way no matter how dark today is. Read More
"Life is really delicate and mysterious and swift and can take you out at a moment’s notice. I want to communicate that through the traces left behind." Read More
Only Lovers Left Alive is about marriage, and about weathering long dark nights of the soul just long enough to see the light again, taking each wave as it comes and then bracing for the next one. Read More
The Sisters Brothers lives in a conflict born of constantly dueling notions: civilization’s failed attempt to tame the wild, the animal impulse’s struggle against the rational impulse, the impossibility of the dream when faced with reality. Read More
In many ways, Russian Doll feels like an extended exercise in cognitive therapy. Read More
On the journey to hell and back in The Crow. Read More
The Warriors is about living with—through, during—the night, a lesson we all learn as kids, and carry with us as we sleep. It’s not so much about the fear of what’s behind, but about running as fast as possible toward what’s on the other side. Read More
Watching The World’s End today, separated from my first viewing by six years that feel more like a lifetime, I don’t see a thrilling and heart-wrenching story. Instead, I see one that’s profoundly sad. Read More
"You know how, in therapy, you realize something was the cause of something else? This film was like natural therapy for me. I started thinking, 'What else do I remember about the one-child policy, and how did it affect me?'" Read More
In many ways, Russian Doll feels like an extended exercise in cognitive therapy. Read More
Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood, a melancholy elegy with a fairy tale at its core, is a work of surprises, from an unconventional structure to stylistic flourishes to a cartoonishly outrageous denouement. Read More
Only Lovers Left Alive is about marriage, and about weathering long dark nights of the soul just long enough to see the light again, taking each wave as it comes and then bracing for the next one. Read More
The Sisters Brothers lives in a conflict born of constantly dueling notions: civilization’s failed attempt to tame the wild, the animal impulse’s struggle against the rational impulse, the impossibility of the dream when faced with reality. Read More
What if, Clue seems to ask, futility isn’t an Achilles’ heel—what if it’s the point? Read More
In John Carpenter's three primary Los Angeles films—Assault on Precinct 13, They Live, and Escape from L.A.—he explores the degree to which paranoia is essential to the American way of life. Read More
The exclusivity of that Los Angeles phenomenon—and the loneliness inherent within it—is the focus of writer-director Sofia Coppola’s only male-centered film, Somewhere. Read More
Hardcore, Paul Schrader’s sophomoric knockout, marked the end of an era—a final chapter in 1970s auteur cinema and the beginning of the slick, commercialized films that defined much of the 1980s. Read More
"Based on an actual lie.” That’s how Lulu Wang’s new film The Farewell starts out, before China-born, U.S.-raised Billi (Awkwafina) returns to Changchun as her family prepares to say goodbye to their matriarch Nai Nai, who’s been diagnosed with cancer.
The one catch: Nai Nai doesn’t know she’s sick. Read More
The Chekhovian ideal is embodied perfectly by Too Long at the Fair, a short film that surveys the vast spectrum of human experience—from frustration to joy, hedonism to shame, regret to awestruck nostalgia—and synthesizes the whole mess into just under 15 minutes of precise and specific storytelling. Read More
While Beginners and In a Lonely Place are radically different films, both portray their characters’ attempts to close the distance between themselves and others, drifting through chiasmatic stories from fear to delusion to fear again. Read More