Film & Television

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

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

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

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

Andrew Delbanco

Kubrick’s Human Comedy

Though Stanley Kubrick was often characterized as icy, his life and filmography reveal that his heart was as large as his mind.

May 13, 2021 issue

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

Gary Younge

‘What the Hell Can I Call Myself Except British?’

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series presents Black Britons not as objects but as protagonists, not as heroes but as humans.

April 29, 2021 issue

Mark O’Connell

Old Midlands Giants

The comedian Stewart Lee’s documentary King Rocker is about a musician who seems impossible to mythologize.

April 8, 2021 issue

The Latest

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

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

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

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

Mark Gevisser

‘Moffie’ and Me

South African filmmakers are confronting an aspect of the apartheid era that marked my generation: an abusive masculinity defined by its homophobia.

May 3, 2021

Claudia Dreifus

‘Comic Terrorism Works’: An Interview with John Waters

The avant-garde filmmaker who wanted to be the filthiest person alive has ended up becoming a national treasure. How did that happen?

April 29, 2021

Devika Girish

What Next, After Protest?: An Interview with Ephraim Asili

The Inheritance, a hybrid mockumentary about a Black Marxist collective, studies the everyday to imagine a new future.

April 11, 2021

Cintra Wilson

‘Where the Patriarchy Strikes’: An Interview with Merrill Markoe

The comedian, artist, and graphic novelist looks back on her career as a woman in comedy on the occasion of her tenth book, a graphic novel based on her childhood diaries.

April 4, 2021