Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Film & Television

Elaine Blair

Designing Women

Making space for women to behave badly in ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ and ‘The Favourite.’

December 17, 2020 issue

A scene from ‘The Face of Depression,’ an episode in season 6 of BoJack Horseman, 2019

Adam Thirlwell

A Horse’s Remorse

The most accurate portrait of contemporary malaise might be a cartoon that stars an asshole sublebrity horse.

August 20, 2020 issue

Andrew Delbanco

Rod Serling’s Night Terrors

The creator of ‘The Twilight Zone’ dramatized isolation and fear but still believed in the best of humanity.

November 19, 2020 issue

Namwali Serpell

In the Time of Monsters

The new ‘Watchmen’ show is an example of the clash of the slick and the woke that we’re seeing in so much contemporary cultural production.

April 9, 2020 issue

J. Hoberman

Tarantino’s Hollywood

Quentin Tarantino’s new movie is a fetish object as well as a film, as much curated as it is directed.

August 19, 2019

Tom Burke as Anthony and Honor Swinton Byrne as Julie in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir

Jana Prikryl

Why Not Film What Happened?

On the films of Joanna Hogg

September 26, 2019 issue

Connell (Paul Mescal) and Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones), Normal People, 2020

Lorrie Moore

Millennials & ‘Normal People’

The series portrays states of mind much better than the novel does. Rooney is not likely to hear from viewers that “your book was better,” at least not very often or accurately, but she also may not care a whit.

July 15, 2020

Ronald Reagan in a publicity still for the film, Law and Order, 1953

J. Hoberman

Ronald Reagan’s Reel Life

Did the movies ever matter? They did to Ronald Reagan.

June 29, 2019

The Latest

J. Hoberman

The ‘Lost World’ of Vittorio De Seta

These luminous shorts depicting the hardscrabble lives of fishermen, shepherds, peasants, and miners in rural Italy turn documentary into art film.

February 14, 2021

Shannon Pufahl

The Look of Lesbian Love

Recent films like Ammonite and Portrait of a Lady on Fire make a spectacle of same-sex desire, but who is meant to enjoy the view?

December 28, 2020

J. Hoberman

Revenge of the Has-Been

Mank is no documentary but a semifactual yarn that burnishes the legend of the showboat, nasty wit, and habitual roisterer who wrote Citizen Kane.

January 14, 2021 issue

Marisa Mazria Katz

‘Horrifying Mundanity’: An Interview with David Osit

In Mayor, his film about the official who runs Ramallah in the West Bank, the director tells a different story about Palestinian life under occupation.

December 10, 2020

J. Hoberman

Fall Films to Stream

William Greaves’s documentary about the 1972 National Black Political Convention, Werner Schroeter’s Malina, and a caper by King Hu.

November 5, 2020

Yasmina Price

Everyday Resistance in ‘Time’

Garrett Bradley’s intimate documentary shows how one person’s incarceration affects the lives of so many more.

October 24, 2020

Kaleem Hawa

The Militant Film of the PLO

The Palestine Film Unit emerged in the late 1960s with the aim of situating Palestine in the global anti-colonial struggle.

October 17, 2020

Shirley Clarke as herself in Agnès Varda's Lions Love (...and Lies), 1969

Sarah Cowan

Shirley Clarke’s Camera

Portrait of Jason is avant-garde in that filmmaker Shirley Clarke offers no proxy for the exploitative filmmaker, but the enduring question is whether Clarke was intentionally damning herself.

October 10, 2020