Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Film & Television

Zadie Smith

The Instrumentalist

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

January 19, 2023 issue

Andrew Martin

DeLillo Studies

Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, a mashup of cinematic tropes and references, never finds the even tone that holds the novel’s contradictions together.

December 21, 2022

Simon Callow

Ol’ Blue Eyes

Paul Newman’s posthumous memoir is a many-sided self-interrogation by a man who was a mystery to himself.

December 22, 2022 issue

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

No Surprises

The comedian Nathan Fielder’s new HBO show is an expensive, painstakingly constructed machine for managing uncertainty.

December 22, 2022 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Keep Your Eye on the Kid

Buster Keaton made his own kind of sense out of the perplexities of existence in ways baffling to those among whom he found himself.

October 20, 2022 issue

Francine Prose

‘We Know What That’s Like’

The filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s recent arrest in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison marks the latest phase in a campaign that the Iranian judiciary has been waging against him for over a decade.

November 3, 2022 issue

Namwali Serpell

‘She’s Capital!’

The figure of the Whore is everywhere in art, her beauty to be gazed upon and admired. With the Internet, has she finally found her own artistic terrain?

July 21, 2022 issue

Hilton Als

Godard’s Women

Cinema is a gift in that it allows for exposition—the betrayal of secrets—in frame after frame, actress by actress.

September 23, 2022

Film & Television

A giant alien spaceship that has landed in Montana in Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation of a story by Ted Chiang

James Gleick

When They Came from Another World

What if the future is as real as the past?

January 19, 2017 issue

James Shapiro

Shakespeare Noir

There are moments in The Tragedy of Macbeth when Shakespeare and Joel Coen feel in perfect alignment.

January 13, 2022 issue

Karan Mahajan

India’s Streaming Auteurs

Realistic depictions of religion, sexuality, and politics have been off-limits in Bollywood for decades, but in recent years directors were able to bypass censorship by moving to the small screen.

July 1, 2021 issue

Fred Rogers and François Clemmons in an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, 1993

Robert Sullivan

The Ministry of Mr. Rogers

He saw his show as a faithful companion to young people and even a daily seminar for parents

January 17, 2019 issue

Film & Television

The Latest

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

Jennifer Wilson

The Agony of Sophia Tolstoy

Frederick Wiseman resurrects the wife of the famed Russian writer only to reduce her to the sum of her grievances.

November 22, 2022

Luke Parker

‘Our Anonymous Shadows’

During his Berlin exile, Vladimir Nabokov developed a fascination with silent and early sound cinema—as a writer, as a moviegoer, and, like many of his fellow émigrés, as an extra.

November 14, 2022

Daniel M. Lavery

Lea’s Turn

Passed over for years to fill Barbra Streisand’s quintessential role, Lea Michele finally justifies a Broadway revival of Funny Girl.

October 27, 2022

Anna Shechtman

Eraser Marks

In Claire Denis’s two latest films, white women come unmoored from the historical crises around them.

October 18, 2022

Anahid Nersessian

Creature Comforts

Lena Dunham’s Catherine Called Birdy brings to boisterous life Karen Cushman’s novel of medieval girlhood.

October 17, 2022

J. Hoberman

Fuzz! Junk! Rumble!

A show at the Jewish Museum surveys three eventful years of art, film, and performance in New York City—and the political upheavals that defined them.

October 10, 2022