On Film

Essays

1365 Results
Winchester ’73: Under the Gun
Winchester ’73: Under the Gun

The first of eight collaborations between actor James Stewart and director Anthony Mann centers on a prize rifle that ends up being both a magical object and a cursed one, sending every man who possesses it to a doomed fate.

By Imogen Sara Smith

The Grifters: City of Angles
The Grifters: City of Angles

In his first Hollywood film, British director Stephen Frears dives into the nihilistic world of Jim Thompson’s fiction, delivering an adaptation profoundly attuned to the novelist’s sense of ineluctable suffering.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling: Songs of Innocence and Experience
Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling: Songs of Innocence and Experience

In his only directorial effort for the big screen, Richard Pryor takes the raw stuff of his life and alchemizes it as art, demonstrating the humor and vulnerability that made him a towering figure in American culture.

By Hilton Als

The Mother and the Whore: Lovers of Paris
The Mother and the Whore: Lovers of Paris

In this digressive, intensely interior masterpiece, Jean Eustache mines the dramas of his past romances while also capturing the disillusionment of young Parisians in the aftermath of May 1968.

By Lucy Sante

Eastern Condors: Collective Action
Eastern Condors: Collective Action

A remarkable breakthrough in Hong Kong action cinema, this rip-roaring spectacle represents the peak of Hung’s commitment to ensemble-oriented filmmaking.

By Sean Gilman

8½: The Beautiful Confusion
8½: The Beautiful Confusion

In this semiautobiographical meditation on the fickle nature of creative genius, Federico Fellini opens his arms wide to the enigmas of childhood, religion, art, sex, and love—mysteries with no solution.

By Stephanie Zacharek

No Country for Old Men: All Hell Breaks Loose
No Country for Old Men: All Hell Breaks Loose

In this brilliant adaptation, Joel and Ethan Coen find a kindred spirit in novelist Cormac McCarthy, whose abiding themes—including destiny, the American West, and the contest between our better natures and our survival instinct—mirror their own.

By Francine Prose

Paper Moon: Partners in Crime
Paper Moon: Partners in Crime

In this tragicomic road movie about a Bible-selling con man and his precocious young charge, Peter Bogdanovich brings Depression-era America to vivid life without sentimentality or nostalgia.

By Mark Harris

The Shape of Water: A Touch of the Unknown
The Shape of Water: A Touch of the Unknown

Combining sci-fi magic and a distinctly human sense of intimacy, Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning film reimagines an oppressive era in American history through a tale of romantic fate.

By Carlos Aguilar

Funny Girl: A Feeling Deep in Your Soul
Funny Girl: A Feeling Deep in Your Soul

William Wyler’s adaptation of the Broadway musical celebrates the indomitability of vaudeville legend Fanny Brice, embodied by Barbra Streisand in an incandescent and remarkably vulnerable performance.

By Michael Koresky

Scarface: Gangster Style
Scarface: Gangster Style

Filled with expressionistic shadows and pungent details of life in the criminal underworld, this seminal tale of money and violence was among director Howard Hawks’s favorite of his own films.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Gummo: It Feels Like Home
Gummo: It Feels Like Home

In his entrancingly deviant directorial debut, Harmony Korine captures life in an impoverished, tragedy-stricken small town in all its beautiful fragility.

By Carlos Aguilar

Demon Pond: Here Comes the Flood
Demon Pond: Here Comes the Flood

This jolt of delicious weirdness from Japanese New Wave master Masahiro Shinoda is both a reverent salute to Kabuki and a self-consciously postmodern take on its traditions.

By Michael Atkinson

The Seventh Victim: The Inner Darkness
The Seventh Victim: The Inner Darkness

Though it received dismissive reviews upon its release, this chillingly nihilistic horror film has since influenced such masters as Alfred Hitchcock and Jacques Rivette with its low-budget evocation of anxiety and indeterminacy.

By Lucy Sante

I Walked with a Zombie: Better Doctors
I Walked with a Zombie: Better Doctors

An otherworldly exploration of the realm between life and death, this horror masterpiece transcends its genre with its poetic, often unsettling use of fragmentation and discontinuity.

By Chris Fujiwara

Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy: No Fucks Given
Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy: No Fucks Given

Emerging out of the mass death, cultural ferment, and semiotic tumult of the 1990s, this trio of deliriously profane films glares at American youth culture and gives zero shits if it looks back.

By Nathan Lee

Happiness: Love & Mercy
Happiness: Love & Mercy

A sceenwriter, novelist, and longtime friend of director Todd Solondz recalls the admiration he felt upon first seeing this audacious ensemble drama, which offers an unflinching, compassionate look at the pain and abjection of being human.

By Bruce Wagner

The Long Good Friday: Corporate Governance
The Long Good Friday: Corporate Governance

A vision of late-1970s London that foreshadows the political volatility of the Margaret Thatcher era, this gangster saga stars an unforgettably tempestuous Bob Hoskins as a little Englander with big dreams.

By Ryan Gilbey

All of Us Strangers: Phantom Attachments
All of Us Strangers: Phantom Attachments

Andrew Haigh explores loss and queer loneliness in this exquisite, twilit tangle of lives and loves separated by space, time, and personal defenses.

By Guy Lodge

Mother: Look, Ma, No Therapist!
Mother: Look, Ma, No Therapist!

Albert Brooks and Debbie Reynolds are at their comedic best in this tale of parent-child bonding filled with Oedipal humor and emotional insight.

By Carrie Rickey

Real Life: A Young, Honest Guy Like Himself
Real Life: A Young, Honest Guy Like Himself

A brilliant satire, inspired by a 1973 PBS documentary series that gave rise to the reality-television genre, Albert Brooks’s first feature film examines the ethical dilemmas of combining cheap entertainment and sociological experiment.

By A. S. Hamrah

Not a Pretty Picture: An Act of Reckoning
Not a Pretty Picture: An Act of Reckoning

In her formally daring debut feature, Martha Coolidge stages a confrontation with the subject of date rape that questions the kind of “closure” required in conventional storytelling.

By Molly Haskell

Two Films by Kira Muratova: Restless Moments
Two Films by Kira Muratova: Restless Moments

In films that elude categorization, the Ukrainian director developed a boldly experimental aesthetic that evokes her mercurial inner dialogue and the leaps and stutters of her imagination.

By Jessica Kiang

Risky Business: Coming of Age in Reagan’s America
Risky Business: Coming of Age in Reagan’s America

Unlike the string of early-1980s sex comedies that it superficially resembles, Paul Brickman’s debut feature fuses fierce social satire and dark, dreamy eroticism with unexpectedly rich and ambiguous results.

By Dave Kehr