First Person

The author of the novel Fiona and Jane looks back on a relationship that never quite solidified—and a future that never quite arrived—through the prism of Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.

Desperately seeking community in her college years, the writer discovered the world of experimental cinema when she stumbled on a short-film program at an art-house in Manchester, England.

The author of the acclaimed book Pop Song came to her love of cinema—including the work of Agnès Varda—by trying to watch her partner’s favorite films through his eyes.

For reasons this veteran editor and best-selling author can’t fully explain, an unsung film adaptation of a Neil Simon play has become an abiding domestic comfort many years after he first encountered it.

The author of the acclaimed novel Memorial reflects on how Edward Yang’s epic swan song has accompanied him around the world, through different stages of his life.

Obsessed with the lure of memory and the stigma of social otherness, Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes inspires this writer to take her own winding journey into the past.

In the 1970s, a decade when blaxploitation ruled, Lady Sings the Blues offered a rare tender vision of Black love and masculinity.

Shortly after the 2020 election, this award-winning writer reflected on the massive Hollywood blockbuster that became an unexpected source of political emotion for her in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory.

Cinematic and carnal ravishment are sometimes at cross-purposes, as this celebrated American essayist discovered after many fumbled attempts at merging the two.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a New York writer recalls the pure, easy pleasures of the multiplex and the feeling of escape at the heart of moviegoing.

The author of The Fortress of Solitude considers the meditative, “brain-rinsing” effects of the solo moviegoing experience.

The author of Call Me by Your Name remembers the first time he saw The Apartment—and the long, late-night pilgrimage through a vanishing Manhattan that the film inspired.