In The Philadelphia Story, Katharine Hepburn pulls off an impressive trick: creating a character we struggle to identify with—who distances herself from others purposefully—but whom we can’t help rooting for anyway.
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On Cate & Kate in The Aviator (2004) and Summertime (1955).
As stars onscreen, Hepburn and Tracy were 100 proof, one of the most successful pairings in American cinema. Offscreen, they were Hollywood’s open secret: a clandestine couple that managed a long-running affair by being invisible in all the right places.
George Cukor's Holiday was neither the first nor last Hepburn and Grant pairing, but here it feels as if they're inventing a new type of relationship—one marked not only by fizzling flirtation or witty repartee, but also deeply infused with loss.
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The year Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Double Life of Véronique premiered at Cannes, I was born one minute before my brother.
This is the nature of Big Night: not to find a way to serve the risotto and the spaghetti together, but to strip the brothers down to their common element.
On this month's show, Karina Wolf joins us to discuss Wings of Desire, the essential decency of Bruno Ganz, Peter Falk’s warmth, transformative romance, whether angels have grandmas, Henri Alekan’s dignifying vision, Wim Wenders’s lack of strategy, how particulars turn universal, and more.
In Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the act of witnessing becomes an act of solidarity, in joy and of pain. This is what a cinema of more life looks like.
If Fleabag can be seen as a love story about sisterhood—that magical, ephemeral, deeply intimate, sometimes painful, and impossible to describe relationship—then may this essay be a love letter to my own sister.
Part fairy tale, part ghost story, Phantom Thread starkly pushes the genre of Gothic Romance into the positively morbid. Yet the fundamental ambiguity in its human relationships casts the longest shadow in this story, filling every corner of the stately rooms in which two unabashedly English souls organize their lives to deny their own fragility.
Featured Essays
from the archives 2013 - 2022
