Springsteen on Broadway restores and replenishes, briefly buoying our battered hearts and reminding us that we are capable of so much more. Read More
Now Playing
In First Avenger, all Captain America had for a compass was the dream. In Winter Soldier, he had the past. By Civil War, he’d seen both of these totems fall apart in the face of an America certain that it knew better than he did. Read More
Dr. Zhivago makes me think of how my own parents measure time: before the revolution, and after it. Read More
If The Last Picture Show is a movie about savoring your precious misery, Texasville is a movie about having a bad case of the blues. Read More
Extras
New Releases, Interviews, Festivals and More
The cinematic alchemy of Burning transforms an abstract theory of liminality into something that an audience can feel in the pulse of every scene and then, perhaps, in their own world. Read More
Much of what I saw in 2018 reflected a related range of anxieties—about difference, catastrophe, isolation, belonging. Maybe that’s every year. Likely it’s too soon to tell. But among the things I saw, in a year of personal and political upheaval and ambivalence, these are the moments that solicited my attention most memorably. Read More
On the one hand, everything we do may be meaningless. Oblivion may be the only truth. But on the other, maybe it’s exactly this ultimate despair that makes our all our everyday actions essential. Read More
A mid-winter love affair feels decadent but also rather necessary, and Cold War rewards like a hot chocolate spiked with brandy: warming, bracing, to be savored. Read More
To watch the show’s four seasons is to watch broad types and tropes become subtler episode by episode, making us slowly question what, and who, the real object of the joke is. Read More
This is where humiliation lives: in the gap between the self we want to be and the self we actually are. Read More
Featured Essays
Rear Window is a movie about the stories we choose to tell. Read More
Every shot in Columbus exudes an intentionality which is controlled but not controlling, each scene an austere but life-filled canvas. Read More
Joe Versus the Volcano reminds us that there’s a whole lot of world-weary out there these days, and nowhere near enough whimsy; that there’s a magic in all of us that’s so rarely considered. Read More
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Issue 66: Food
December 2018
It can be so frustrating to have parents, particularly at mealtimes. Read More
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a skin-flayed, nerve-burst confession, a self-loathing crucifixion of the kind of toxically hyper masculine pathology that poisoned Sam Peckinpah's personal life, but inspired his deliriously compelling art. Read More
In Howl’s Moving Castle, food is more than just a necessity—it sustains life, in every sense of the phrase: helping a body hold skin and sinew together, while acting as an expression of love and care. Read More
From the archives
2013-2019
Andrea Arnold is forging a kind of egalitarian filmmaking, where the individual efforts of each and every collaborator pull equal weight. Read More
When I was about nine years old, my grandparents came to watch my siblings and I for a long weekend while my parents were at the wedding of some old college friends. I have only one recollection of that weekend, but it is a formative one; it involves my grandfather, the... Read More
Reconnecting with childhood joy in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom Read More
It's hard to know whether The Mule will be Clint Eastwood’s final film, either in front of or behind the camera—but it sure feels like it. Read More
On the one hand, everything we do may be meaningless. Oblivion may be the only truth. But on the other, maybe it’s exactly this ultimate despair that makes our all our everyday actions essential. Read More
A mid-winter love affair feels decadent but also rather necessary, and Cold War rewards like a hot chocolate spiked with brandy: warming, bracing, to be savored. Read More
This scream is a scream of defiance. Read More
The cinematic alchemy of Burning transforms an abstract theory of liminality into something that an audience can feel in the pulse of every scene and then, perhaps, in their own world. Read More
What makes Mission: Impossible — Fallout and Free Solo what they are is not death. It’s the spectatorship of death. It’s watching those around a person come to terms with what we all know is out there. Read More
Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman works as a time capsule for a specific era and place, preserving the image of Taiwan—a picture of prosperity and encroaching Western influence—as it hurtled toward the 21st century. Read More
Loving My Best Friend’s Wedding doesn’t necessarily mean loving all of it, and yet, here I am saying I do. Read More
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a skin-flayed, nerve-burst confession, a self-loathing crucifixion of the kind of toxically hyper masculine pathology that poisoned Sam Peckinpah's personal life, but inspired his deliriously compelling art. Read More
To be aware of beauty is to be corrupted by it, to develop a covetous lust for it, to equate possessing it with consuming it. Read More
Bread may not be an explicitly feminist film in the way that we understand that today, but what remains still speaks to where we’ve come from, and where we still need to go. Read More
It can be so frustrating to have parents, particularly at mealtimes. Read More