Film & Television

Intolerable Freedoms

The Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy darkly anticipated some of the central conflicts of the post–cold war period.

October 19, 2023 issue

James Quandt

Jean Eustache’s Vehement Realism

The French director Jean Eustache used his films to examine his ravaged life and relationships with merciless accuracy.

September 21, 2023 issue

Lauren Michele Jackson

Humorless Barbie

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie finds its comedy in the inflexibility both of plastic and of modern womanhood.

August 27, 2023

Andrew O’Hagan

Scorpion Party

Succession dispenses with the toys and horses of the media mogul family and goes straight to the “carnival of mind-fuck.”

August 17, 2023 issue

Lucy Jakub

Love’s Work

In his films for children, Hayao Miyazaki has used the labor-intensive art of animation to study the major problem of adult life.

July 13, 2023

Katie Kirkland

Unforgettable, Unrememberable

The Thai filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong uses time-bending narratives and disruptive forms to confront her country’s past.

August 10, 2023

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

Martin Filler

Oppie’s Problem

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer captures the drama of the physicist’s life to thrilling effect but glosses over an essential part of his conundrum.

July 21, 2023

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

Jennifer Wilson

We Got Next

By treating the league as a sisterhood or a worthwhile cause, a new documentary about the WNBA risks dulling its competitive edge.

December 7, 2023

Anna Shechtman and D.A. Miller

Managing Monstrosity

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film suggests how matter-of-factly adults force queer children to hide their difference.

December 6, 2023

Susan Tallman

‘What Happens at the Edges?’

The artist William Kentridge is interested in who decides which people constitute the center and which the periphery, in finding meaning in the fragmentary and provisional.

December 21, 2023 issue