Arts

Film & Television

The Vanishing Mr. Beame

With absorbing footage of gutted apartment buildings and ravaged storefronts, Drop Dead City anatomizes the drama of New York’s descent into near bankruptcy.

June 26, 2025 issue

Dennis Zhou

The Quantum Generation

The filmmaker Jia Zhangke has spent a career trying to capture how China’s ordinary citizens experience the twenty-first century.

May 13, 2025

Sophie Pinkham

‘Isn’t Reality Sad Enough?’

In the films of the Ukrainian director Kira Muratova, characters are always tipping toward both laughter and violence.

May 17, 2025

Adam Thirlwell

Rotten in Denmark

Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom is a soap opera about a hospital where the doctors aren’t good-looking or vibrating with noble sentiment but generally corrupt or insane.

April 10, 2025 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Living Wide

Foster Hirsch’s Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties is an implicit memoir, revisiting his experience of a staggering array of films and the world in which they emerged.

April 10, 2025 issue

Colin Grant

Hiding in the Front Room

The BBC series Mr Loverman, about a closeted West Indian grandfather and his family, explores the submerged emotional lives of the Windrush generation in Britain.

March 13, 2025 issue

Alma Guillermoprieto

A Telenovela Macondo

Netflix’s adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude has skimmed off only the melodramatic and the anecdotal parts of Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece.

February 27, 2025 issue

Andrew Katzenstein

The Impressionist

Over more than fifty years of documentary filmmaking, Frederick Wiseman has made an art of withholding judgment and showing people figuring things out on their own.

February 27, 2025 issue

Blockbusters

Martin Gardner

The Third Coming

“For those who cannot believe in the Second Coming, or the Messianic hopes of orthodox Judaism, there are the UFOs! If the earth is being visited by extraterrestrials, surely the aliens must be friendly or by now we would have learned otherwise.”

January 26, 1978 issue

Stephen Jay Gould

Dinomania

When dinosaurs get the Hollywood treatment, will museums follow suit?

August 12, 1993 issue

Daniel Mendelsohn

The Wizard

“Avatar’s desire to have its anthropological cake and eat it too suggests something deeply unself-aware and disturbingly unresolved within Cameron himself.”

March 25, 2010 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

The Latest

Poorna Swami

Of Light

Payal Kapadia’s films are defined by the slippage between women’s longing and the dogged grip of reality—not least of India’s unyielding social divisions.

March 14, 2025

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

A Country for Old Monsters

In Nosferatu and Wolf Man, the forces of evil are not so much confronted as fatalistically, inevitably succumbed to.

February 10, 2025

Anna Shechtman

Sympathy for the Troll

Leos Carax’s ostentatiously intelligent films, full of references to cinematic history, are all in frantic search of a worldview.

January 26, 2025

Jé Wilson

Real Misfits in Real Gardens

The Italian director Alice Rohrwacher’s films often focus on incongruous moments of enchantment within communities living at the margins of society.

February 13, 2025 issue

Nawal Arjini

Tinker Tailor Soldier Sigh

Where we might have expected a show about the state of the nation, the spy series Slow Horses instead examines the state of the office.

January 18, 2025

Andrew Katzenstein

‘Haunted, Haunted’

The characters in Mike Leigh’s new feature, anchored by a magnificent performance by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, hardly seem to be living in his usual noisy democracy.

January 16, 2025

Katie Kadue

‘Let Them Eat War’

Ridley Scott’s sequel to Gladiator draws on a long history of nostalgia for an idealized republican Rome.

December 15, 2024

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

As You Like It

Sam Barlow’s video games may be the first efforts at interactive cinema—by either a game designer or a filmmaker—that work.

December 19, 2024 issue

Beatrice Loayza

‘The Look of Shame’

The French director Catherine Breillat has spent her career insisting on women’s agency and reclaiming taboo desires—sometimes with troubling implications.

November 21, 2024