Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Film & Television

J. Hoberman

Framing Babyn Yar

Sergei Loznitsa’s documentaries, sourced from archival propaganda, have drawn criticism for what they do not show.

March 29, 2022

Elvia Wilk

Corpus Meets Corpse

The intricate and densely referential video work of Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley confronts standard history with the fact of the body.

April 7, 2022 issue

J. Hoberman

Romanian Masquerades

In Radu Jude’s ‘Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn,’ Bucharest is half built and half derelict—a semiotic jungle and a ruin waiting to happen.

March 24, 2022 issue

Colm Tóibín

The Secrets of Others

In Parallel Mothers, Pedro Almodóvar goes beyond his familiar themes of sex and motherhood and into new territory: the legacy of the Spanish Civil War.

March 10, 2022 issue

Andrew O’Hagan

Riffraff

Billy Wilder’s evolution from interwar stylist to hard-bitten realist.

February 24, 2022 issue

Mark Yakich

Language Is the Game in ‘Ted Lasso’

Whitman and Joyce may seem unlikely references for a sports sitcom—unless we’ve been reading the show all wrong.

January 19, 2022

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

Lorrie Moore

The Tender Trap

We ask marriage to provide personal growth plus affectionate companionship, sexual appreciation, and spiritual renewal. Can it sustain that expectation?

December 16, 2021 issue

The Latest

Cathleen Schine

Subjects of Considerable Gossip

Greta Garbo craved protection, and one such guardian was Salka Viertel, a nearly forgotten screenwriter who nurtured a community of fellow émigrés in postwar Hollywood.

June 9, 2022 issue

Edwidge Danticat

Haiti Reframed

By bringing to life on screen a neighborhood poised between trouble and joy, Gessica Généus’s Freda offers a richly textured dissent from infantilizing accounts of her country.

December 21, 2021

J. Hoberman

A Conceptual Artist of Cinema

Now ninety-two, the Canadian filmmaker Michael Snow is receiving a retrospective of a career that brought a playful avant-garde sensibility to the moving image.

December 3, 2021

Elaine Blair

Hemingway’s Consolations

It’s preposterous to think of Hemingway, with his best sellers and personal celebrity, as a writer’s writer. But is it possible that this might be the best description of his status today?

September 23, 2021 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

J. Hoberman

‘Undine’ Retold

With its haunting indifference to logic, German director Christian Petzold’s version of the myth is a study of the ways in which men and women misunderstand one another.

May 30, 2021

Max Nelson

Alone Together in Taipei

Intimacy in Tsai Ming-liang’s films is an elusive possession, but the desire for it is constant and always particular.

June 10, 2021 issue

Sasha Frere-Jones

The Paranoid Style in Adam Curtis

His films choreograph archive footage, charismatic pop, and portentous commentary in pursuit of a dark, totalizing narrative—all the seduction of conspiracy theory without the substance.

May 8, 2021