Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Film & Television

Anna Shechtman

Wages for Housewives

The Real Housewives’ work is to produce drama, and to keep their jobs they must be prolific.

May 14, 2023

Yasmine El Rashidi

Stories Adrift

The crux of Netflix’s melodrama The Swimmers, a biopic of two Syrian refugees who pursued Olympic stardom, is everything it leaves unsaid.

May 9, 2023

Elaine Blair

The Limits of Language

In the newsroom and in Hollywood, a new vernacular is emerging to describe sexual assault.

May 25, 2023 issue

Zadie Smith

The Instrumentalist

At the heart of the film Tár is a conductor who cannot see beyond her generation’s field of vision.

January 19, 2023 issue

Matt Seaton

The British Broadcasting Conundrum

World War II was the BBC’s finest hour, but its history since then reflects the corporation’s gradual loss of primacy in British life.

April 20, 2023 issue

Maya Binyam

Hiding in Plain Sight

The filmmaker Garrett Bradley uses archival material—home movies, fragments of early black cinema—to reimagine the present.

February 13, 2023

Alizeh Kohari

Flipping the Script in Lahore

Joyland and the documentary Showgirls of Pakistan explore the boundaries of identity and desire in an oppressively performative society.

April 9, 2023

Orville Schell

Appeasement at the Cineplex

Unable to resist China’s huge market, Hollywood has proven willing to alter its films to avoid offending Beijing.

April 6, 2023 issue

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

Ruth Franklin

The Millions We Failed to Save

The recent documentary The US and the Holocaust is a scathing, even bombastic indictment of US immigration policy over the past 160 years.

June 22, 2023 issue

Martin Filler

Too Good for Hollywood

Despite her long career on stage and screen—from an Oscar nomination to the blacklist—Aline MacMahon never became a household name.

June 22, 2023 issue

Jean Dykstra

‘Looking Out’

The podcast Ear Hustle and the photographs and writing collected in The San Quentin Project reveal the granular details of prison life without glossing over its violence or obscuring the humanity of incarcerated people.

May 11, 2023 issue

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Love’s Body Count

In HBO’s The Last of Us, violence never implicates the viewer as it did the player.

March 29, 2023

Andrew O’Hagan

Bigger, Deeper, and More ‘Fucked Up’

When asked why HBO took such bold risks on shows that were darker, more libidinal, and more surreal than those on other networks, a company executive replied, “Because we can.”

March 23, 2023 issue

Daniel Drake

Present Imperfect

Aftersun captures the loss of a parent, a story for which there are no spoilers.

February 19, 2023

Sam Huber

Risk, Originality, Commitment

For Andrea Dworkin, literature and social change were always entwined.

January 26, 2023

Austin Gilkeson

The Lore of the Rings

J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction is suffused with the pleasures of scholarship and study. Amazon’s new franchise The Rings of Power can’t sit still.

January 24, 2023

Spencer Lee-Lenfield

Mysterious Displays of Will

Nadine Hwang—a queer Chinese lawyer who joined the army, circulated in Paris salons, and survived Ravensbrück—never wrote a memoir, but her life itself became a work of art.

January 4, 2023