Film & Television

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

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

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

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

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

The Latest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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