A Year’s Worth of Essential Reading
Ring in the new year with a look back at some of the most exciting pieces we published in 2023, including explorations of underappreciated subgenres, essays on film music and production design, and tributes to influential auteurs like Yasujiro Ozu and Anthony Mann. We hope you enjoy this selection of articles, and we look forward to sharing more great writing with you next year!
JANUARY
Their Sounds Were Watching God
By Harmony Holiday
Films like Fire Music, Ornette: Made in America, and Space Is the Place chronicle the development of free jazz, a fiercely experimental art form that has baffled and enthralled listeners in equal measure.
FEBRUARY
One of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s closest collaborators, the Polish composer suffuses the quotidian images that appear throughout Blue, White, and Red with deep poetry and sacred meaning.
MARCH
The Velvet and the Worms: Ester Krumbachová’s Unsung Legacy
By Jonathan Owen
Primarily known as a costume and production designer, this multitalented visionary deserves to be more widely recognized as one of the most important creative forces behind the Czechoslovak New Wave.
APRIL
The Wet Dreams and Twisted Politics of Erotic Thrillers
By Beatrice Loayza
Soft-core porn meets film noir in this Hollywood subgenre, which at the height of its popularity captured the fraught aspirationalism and sexual mores of the 1980s and ’90s.
MAY
One of the first hit movies made by an Asian American team, They Call Me Bruce confronts everyday racism with irreverent humor emblematic of its era.
JUNE
Darkness Visible: Anthony Mann and James Stewart’s Westerns
By K. Austin Collins
Beloved Hollywood actor James Stewart showed a turbulent, sometimes downright sinister side in his collaborations with director Anthony Mann, which include the classic westerns Winchester ’73 and The Man from Laramie.
JULY
Meaning in the Method: A Conversation with Ellen Burstyn
By Isaac Butler
The award-winning actor talks to the author of The Method about training with Lee Strasberg, her involvement in the Actors Studio, and her on- and off-screen contributions to two of her most important films.
AUGUST
The Replacements: AI in the Movies
By Gregory Zinman
Over the past half-century of sci-fi cinema, the theme of artificial intelligence has foregrounded our anxieties about sex, reproduction, and labor in the modern world.
SEPTEMBER
The Man Behind the Wheel
By Christina Newland
Amid the social turbulence of the Nixon era, car movies served to explore and embody the contradictions of American masculinity.
OCTOBER
Noir by Gaslight
By Farran Smith Nehme
A cycle of films from the 1940s and ’50s combine twisted crime narratives with romance and late-nineteenth-century settings.
NOVEMBER
Wild Combinations: A Conversation with Matt Wolf
By Hillary Weston
With his passion for preservation and desire for experimentation, the documentary filmmaker creates portraits of visionary outsiders in a style guided less by narrative than by emotion.
DECEMBER
Deeper into Ozu
By Moeko Fujii, Sean Gilman, Pamela Hutchinson, Aliza Ma, Musab Younis, and Genevieve Yue
Six writers celebrate the 120th anniversary of Japanese titan Yasujiro Ozu’s birth by exploring a few of his most underappreciated works.
More: Features
Thoughts Transcending Time and Distance: Makoto Shinkai’s Voices of a Distant Star
In this early-career gem from one of the most beloved Japanese animation directors of all time, an extravagant sci-fi narrative is anchored by the transcendent power of young love and poignant observations of modern life.
Trash and Treasure at the Razzies
What makes a “bad” movie anyway? By surveying the bombs, disasters, and secret masterpieces (dis)honored at the Golden Raspberry Awards, we can learn much about American cinema’s prevailing standards of taste.
Cinema Revolutionary: Fernando de Fuentes in Morelia
The subject of a revelatory retrospective at last year’s Morelia International Film Festival, this groundbreaking director ushered in Mexican cinema’s golden age with vibrant explorations of the nation’s folk traditions and revolutionary past.
Becoming Hou Hsiao-hsien
Though the Taiwanese director began working in commercial genres, even his earliest mainstream films contain the seeds of the inimitable style that would establish him as one of the world’s most important filmmakers.