Author Spotlight

Molly Haskell

Molly Haskell is a critic and author whose books include From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies; Love and Other Infectious Diseases; Frankly, My Dear: “Gone with the Wind” Revisited; and Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films. She won the 2017 career achievement award from the New York Film Critics Circle.

15 Results
Carole Lombard’s Divine Lunacy

A raucous, fast-talking diva, the actor had a remarkable ability to convey both glamour and silliness, a gift that made her the queen of screwball comedy before her untimely death in 1942.

By Molly Haskell

Girlfriends: Second Births

With rare immediacy and subtlety, Claudia Weill’s low-budget feature debut explores how the fraught dynamics of women’s friendships can be every bit as complex as a love affair.

By Molly Haskell

The Magnificent Ambersons

What Is and What Might Have Been

Even as he chronicles the downfall of an American family, Orson Welles brings a sense of buoyancy to this grim saga through his virtuoso storytelling.

By Molly Haskell

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Fanny and Alexander: The Other Side

This sensuous, sprawling epic, which Ingmar Bergman intended to be his swan song, offers an effortless summing up of the themes—among them family, identity, and mortality—he'd spent a career exploring.

By Molly Haskell

The Awful Truth: Divorce, McCarey Style

With a mix of improvisation, balletic physicality, and slapstick humor, Hollywood master Leo McCarey crafted the most sublime of screwball comedies.

By Molly Haskell

iClouds of Sils Maria

In Olivier Assayas’s 2014 film Clouds of Sils Maria, Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart play out a story centered on the complexities of female relationships, the making and undoing of boundaries between people, and our anxieties about the passag

By Molly Haskell

The Soft Skin: Love and Betrayal on the Lecture Circuit

François Truffaut’s adultery drama is at times corrosively funny and at others frighteningly tense, but it’s always incisive and humane.

By Molly Haskell

Ace in the Hole: Noir in Broad Daylight
Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against a relatively hon…

By Molly Haskell

Nashville: America Singing

With its dazzling array of characters, acerbic take on American entertainment and politics, and innovative approach to sound, this is the ultimate Robert Altman movie.

By Molly Haskell

The Earrings of Madame de . . . :The Cost of Living
For those of us who rank The Earrings of Madame de . . . at the top of our list of all-time favorite films, the mystery is why our passion isn’t universally shared. Every year, thanks to committed revival houses, new members are recruited to our cu…

By Molly Haskell

The Life and Death and Life of Colonel Blimp

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s adroit masterpiece is war film, dark comedy, historical drama, poignant romance, and a portrait of the modern woman.

By Molly Haskell

That Hamilton Woman: Real Love/Reel Love
Is That Hamilton Woman, starring Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier at their most heart-stoppingly beautiful and mutually enraptured, one of the most romantic movies ever made because or in spite of the fact that it was designed as propaganda? It was …

By Molly Haskell

Claire’s Knee: Rohmer’s Women

Of Rohmer’s six moral tales, none seems more indigenous to cinema than Claire’s Knee, the joint in question, that of a pretty blonde teenager on a ladder, becoming the fulcrum of an exquisite dissertation on the perversity of desire.

By Molly Haskell

À nos amours: The Ties That Wound
The teenage girl on the cusp of sexual awakening is a beloved icon of French cinema. Part child, part femme fatale, innocent and dangerous in equal proportions, these schoolgirl seductresses, born to blossom under the eye of the camera, have exerted …

By Molly Haskell

Cléo from 5 to 7
Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, the first fully-achieved feature by the woman who would become the premiere female director of her generation, dazzled when it opened, and looks even more timely today in its tackling of the fashionable subject of f…

By Molly Haskell