Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Film & Television

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

Regina King as Angela Abar in her Sister Night costume in Watchmen

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

Jana Prikryl

Why Not Film What Happened?

On the films of Joanna Hogg

September 26, 2019 issue

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

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

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

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

Luca Marinelli in Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden, 2019

J. Hoberman

Self-Made Men

October 22, 2020 issue

Forrest Goodluck, Michael Greyeyes and Kiowa Gordon in Jeff Barnaby's Blood Quantum, 2019

Robert Sullivan

A Very American Zombie Virus

What makes Blood Quantum, an old-school zombie film, a credit to its genre is the way it honors indigenous filmmaking.

September 5, 2020

Mike Nichols on the set of Catch-22, Guaymas, Mexico, 1969

Simon Callow

Charm Defensive

Mike Nichols was charismatic, witty, invariably quotable. But do I feel I knew him? Not at all.

September 24, 2020 issue

Dinah Washington in Jazz on a Summer's Day, 1959

J. Hoberman

Films to Stream

More virtual summer is provided by the Criterion Channel, which is streaming its comprehensive collection of Olympic films from Stockholm 1912 to London 2012.

August 11, 2020

Wayne (Jared Keeso), Dan (K. Trevor Wilson), Katy (Michelle Mylett), and Daryl (Nathan Dales), Letterkenny, 2016

Cintra Wilson

Brutal, Moral 'LetterKenny'

The ensemble comedy is a mix of ferociously smart, savage dialogue and lyrical, slow-motion fight scenes that have you rooting for them like a hockey fan.

July 24, 2020

Billie Browning and Suzanne Browning in Suzanne, Suzanne, directed by Camille Billops, 1982

Phoebe Chen

The Films of Women’s Liberation

An exceptional series, “Tell Me: Women Filmmakers, Women’s Stories,” is an occasion to reconsider the ranging paths of feminist media production stoked by women’s liberation in the early 1970s.

June 27, 2020

Tommye Myrick as Maria Mathis in Horace Jenkins's Cane River, 1982

Tiana Reid

'Cane River' and the Black Outdoors

Cane River follows the ups and downs of a conventional romance’s plot of courtship, but the major conflict is the slow but powerful tick of history.

June 20, 2020