The Damaged Soul of The Mother and the Whore
Jean Eustache’s famous elegy for a left-wing generation is, at its heart, reactionary.
Winter 2024
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The Killer Inside Me
Both merciless and humane, Happening presents abortion in the spirit of Simone de Beauvoir in the Manifesto of the 343—as something necessary to allow women the ability to realize their full potential as citizens.
The Fearlessness of Passing
Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel continues the author’s exploration of the suffocating strictures of the color line.
Borrowed Time
In Wong Kar Wai’s movies, nostalgia is the characters’ constant state. In 2046, a sense of imminent loss gives the director’s vision an edge of defiance.
The Exhausted Radiance of Claudine
The 1974 romance Claudine is one of the few true depictions of working-class life in a decade of great films that rarely addressed the topic.
The Myth of the Cosa Nostra
Marco Bellocchio’s The Traitor is a smashing movie about the informant whose revelations led to the Maxi Trial of the 1980s, which decimated the Italian mob.
Tarantino’s Reverie of Old Hollywood
Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood turns Hollywood’s most infamous night of horror into the dawn of a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
Happy Birthday, Pauline
Pauline Kael was one of the great voices of American freedom. The road she opened for critics is simultaneously the most rewarding and the most difficult to follow.
The Problem with Film Criticism
The debate about the state of film criticism has settled—or calcified—into two camps: traditional print critics claim the Internet has replaced expertise with amateurs, fanboys, and obscurantists. Web enthusiasts counter that we’re in a new golden age of film criticism …
Violence as the Best Revenge: Fantasies of Dead Nazis 
Spoiler alert: This piece gives away key plot details about Inglourious Basterds. Quentin Tarantino’s Second World War adventure, like Bonnie and Clyde, is a distillation of the movies, tall tales, and shared legends that color our view of the past. …
The Jackson Reaction
Charles Taylor: The Jackson Reaction
Role of a Lifetime: Ronald Reagan and his Revolution
Not every actor who gets a role that defines him is lucky. Ronald Reagan had to wait until the very end of his acting career for his defining role, mob boss Browning in Don Siegel’s 1964 The Killers, and he …
The Day After: It’s Been a Long Time Coming
Day After: C. Taylor – A Long Time Coming
A Wrench in the Machine for Living: Frank Gehry Comes to Brooklyn
From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City by Nathan Glazer Princeton University Press, 2007, 310 pp., $24.95 Like many utopian visions that someone is crazy enough to attempt to realize, modernist architecture has always …
The “Duke” and Democracy: On John Wayne
One of the great joys of the movies is their ability to convince us that we know the people on screen. Even the varied performances of the most versatile stars are often not strong enough to prevail against the overarching …
