Author Spotlight

Kent Jones

Kent Jones is a filmmaker and writer. His documentaries include A Letter to Elia (2010), codirected with Martin Scorsese, and Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015), and he made his fiction debut with the critically acclaimed Diane (2018). He is also the author of several books of criticism. He is currently in preproduction on his next film, My Ship.

32 Results
The Tree of Life: Let the Wind Speak

The imitation of nature becomes a devotional act in Terrence Malick’s cinema, which reaches sublime heights in this exploration of childhood, memory, and grief.

By Kent Jones

Revenge: The Long Road Home

Suffused with a quiet radiance, this Kazakh New Wave masterpiece grapples with cultural displacement through an allegorical tale of vengeance.


By Kent Jones

The Squid and the Whale: 4 Way Street

In his deeply personal third feature, Noah Baumbach charts a family’s dissolution against the backdrop of 1980s literary Brooklyn.

By Kent Jones

A Poem Is a Naked Person: I Shall Be Released

Les Blank’s long-lost documentary revels in the trippy, eccentric world of and surrounding Tulsa Sound pioneer Leon Russell, transforming what might have been a standard concert movie into a genuine work of art.


By Kent Jones

Inside Llewyn Davis: The Sound of Music

Inside Llewyn Davis takes its protagonist on a Hero’s Journey of characteristically Coen-esque proportions—a voyage at turns serious and comic, and framed by an exquisitely curated selection of folk melodies.

By Kent Jones

Hiroshima mon amour: Time Indefinite
“I think that in a few years, in ten, in twenty, or thirty years, we shall know whether Hiroshima mon amour was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema.” That was Eric Rohmer, in a July 1959 roundtable discuss…

By Kent Jones

The Friends of Eddie Coyle: They Were Expendable

Peter Yates's crime drama is a haunting, singular experience, brutal and minutely observed, with a remarkably authentic sense of place.

By Kent Jones

Overlord: A Soldier for All Seasons
Few national cinemas have confronted the issue of preparedness for war with the creative vigor of England’s. Thorold Dickinson’s The Next of Kin (1942), Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? (1942, from a story by Graham Greene), and, of cour…

By Kent Jones

World Cinema Project: Recalled to Life

The critic and WCP executive director offers a personal take on art cinema and a primer on the project’s scope and mission.

By Kent Jones

A Woman Under the Influence: The War at Home
If there’s one quality that separates John Cassavetes’s movies from almost everybody else’s, it’s the density of detail in the storytelling. His films need to be read closely, from beginning to end. There are no lulls with Cassavetes, no laps…

By Kent Jones

Approaching Shoah

How Claude Lanzmann made a thoughtful film about the unthinkable and unfilmable.

By Kent Jones

3:10 to Yuma: Curious Distances

Delmer Daves’s classic western is psychologically probing, magnificently shot, and fascinatingly ambiguous.

By Kent Jones

Jubal: Awakened to Goodness

Delmer Daves’s visually majestic, emotionally charged western finds its drama in the decency of its characters.

By Kent Jones

Two-Lane Blacktop: Slow Ride
The two movies that opened the door to “youth culture” in Hollywood, The Graduate and Easy Rider, were milestones, to be sure. But can it really be said that they were milestones in the art of cinema? “I think The Graduate is not really a very …

By Kent Jones

Rosetta: Radical Economy

The camera never stops moving in the Dardenne brothers’ portrait of a troubled teenage girl desperate for a job.

By Kent Jones

La promesse: One Plus One

The Dardennes threw down the gauntlet for a new type of unadorned dramatic storytelling with their breakthrough tale of a working-class boy’s fraught coming-of-age.

By Kent Jones

The Royal Tenenbaums: Faded Glories
Simply stated, Wes Anderson is the most original presence in American film comedy since Preston Sturges. He is as boundlessly confident as  Sturges was in his heyday, and he has a similarly keen ear for gaudy dialogue; a gift for surprise and fo…

By Kent Jones

Three Popular Films by Jean-Pierre Gorin
Poto and Cabengo: Three-Part Harmony Jean-Pierre Gorin’s three Southern California movies are so militantly unclassifiable that terms like documentary or essay film seem as hopelessly out of sync with the recalcitrant and frequently exhilarati…

By Kent Jones

Dazed and Confused: Dream On

The film is made up of a succession of small visions, observed and executed with apparent ease but thought through with such exquisite care and attention that the experience becomes overwhelming.

By Kent Jones

Yi Yi: Time and Space

In Yang’s cinema in general, and in Yi Yi in particular, character and environment are inseparable.


By Kent Jones

Five Easy Pieces: The Solitude
The solitude. Of men, sometimes women, who refused to settle on a place, a role, a “stable” identity. They walked through my life for a few years when I was a boy—carpenters, child-care workers, counselors, psychiatric patients. Some of them…

By Kent Jones

Black Narcissus: Empire of the Senses
“It is the most erotic film that I have ever made,” wrote Michael Powell of Black Narcissus. “It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image, from the beginning to the end.” In his winningly grand manner, Powell wa…

By Kent Jones

Summer Hours: A Time to Live and a Time to Die

In this beautiful portrait of a French family, Olivier Assayas is stoically removed yet lovingly attentive to his characters’ vanities, idiosyn­crasies, and reserves of goodwill.

By Kent Jones

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: The Man Who Watched the Hours Go By
There are few careers in big-time modern American moviemaking like David Fincher’s. Where almost everyone else in the last two decades has felt obliged to define him- or herself right out of the gate, Fincher has evolved from movie to movie. If you…

By Kent Jones