Arts

Film & Television

Rotten in Denmark

Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom is a soap opera about a hospital where the doctors aren’t good-looking or vibrating with noble sentiment but generally corrupt or insane.

April 10, 2025 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Living Wide

Foster Hirsch’s Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties is an implicit memoir, revisiting his experience of a staggering array of films and the world in which they emerged.

April 10, 2025 issue

Colin Grant

Hiding in the Front Room

The BBC series Mr Loverman, about a closeted West Indian grandfather and his family, explores the submerged emotional lives of the Windrush generation in Britain.

March 13, 2025 issue

Alma Guillermoprieto

A Telenovela Macondo

Netflix’s adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude has skimmed off only the melodramatic and the anecdotal parts of Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece.

February 27, 2025 issue

Andrew Katzenstein

The Impressionist

Over more than fifty years of documentary filmmaking, Frederick Wiseman has made an art of withholding judgment and showing people figuring things out on their own.

February 27, 2025 issue

Poorna Swami

Of Light

Payal Kapadia’s films are defined by the slippage between women’s longing and the dogged grip of reality—not least of India’s unyielding social divisions.

March 14, 2025

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

A Country for Old Monsters

In Nosferatu and Wolf Man, the forces of evil are not so much confronted as fatalistically, inevitably succumbed to.

February 10, 2025

Anna Shechtman

Sympathy for the Troll

Leos Carax’s ostentatiously intelligent films, full of references to cinematic history, are all in frantic search of a worldview.

January 26, 2025

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

Sophie Pinkham

‘Isn’t Reality Sad Enough?’

In the films of the Ukrainian director Kira Muratova, characters are always tipping toward both laughter and violence.

May 17, 2025

Dennis Zhou

The Quantum Generation

The filmmaker Jia Zhangke has spent a career trying to capture how China’s ordinary citizens experience the twenty-first century.

May 13, 2025

Jé Wilson

Real Misfits in Real Gardens

The Italian director Alice Rohrwacher’s films often focus on incongruous moments of enchantment within communities living at the margins of society.

February 13, 2025 issue

Nawal Arjini

Tinker Tailor Soldier Sigh

Where we might have expected a show about the state of the nation, the spy series Slow Horses instead examines the state of the office.

January 18, 2025

Andrew Katzenstein

‘Haunted, Haunted’

The characters in Mike Leigh’s new feature, anchored by a magnificent performance by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, hardly seem to be living in his usual noisy democracy.

January 16, 2025

Katie Kadue

‘Let Them Eat War’

Ridley Scott’s sequel to Gladiator draws on a long history of nostalgia for an idealized republican Rome.

December 15, 2024

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

As You Like It

Sam Barlow’s video games may be the first efforts at interactive cinema—by either a game designer or a filmmaker—that work.

December 19, 2024 issue

Beatrice Loayza

‘The Look of Shame’

The French director Catherine Breillat has spent her career insisting on women’s agency and reclaiming taboo desires—sometimes with troubling implications.

November 21, 2024

Patricia J. Williams

Torn Apart

Errol Morris’s new documentary looks unflinchingly at the horrors of Donald Trump’s policy of separating families at the border.

December 5, 2024 issue

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

I, Coppola

Megalopolis, the director’s first film in thirteen years, is a useful reminder of how inimical extreme wealth is to democratic thinking—and to clear thinking in general.

November 3, 2024