Film

Browse our essays and reviews on film and TV.

The Virus Has Seized the Means of Production

Virology is often confused with the invisible workings of capital.

  • Mark Bould

The Plots Against America

Alternate histories like Philip Roth’s force us to imagine a different America.

  • Matt Gallagher

The Precarity of Black Motherhood

Jordan Peele's ‘Us’ depicts the terrors faced by black mothers in a way that owes as much to Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ as it does to classic Hollywood horror. 

  • Tao Leigh Goffe

The Other Toni Morrison

A timely new documentary celebrates Morrison’s novels but downplays the enduring power of her work as an editor and essayist.

  • Joy James

Aretha Franklin’s Soul

Amazing Grace, the long-lost film of Franklin’s gospel album, offers a lesson in the deep connections between gospel and soul music.

  • Ed Pavlić

Monsters vs. Empire

Trump’s Space Force is a bad reboot of the old imperial fantasy of control from above.

  • Mark Bould

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Sorry, Not Sorry

Boots Riley’s film Sorry to Bother You roasts racial capitalism and issues an unapologetic call for revolution.

  • Robin D. G. Kelley

Errol Morris on Steve Bannon’s Dangerous “Dharma”

Morris on his new film—and what’s at stake in trying to understand its subject.

  • Errol Morris
  • Deborah Chasman

Haneke and the Technology of Intimacy

‘Happy End’ is the culmination of Haneke’s obsession with how technology mediates our desires.

  • Francey Russell

Black Panther Is Not the Movie We Deserve

The movie, unique for its Black star power, depends on a shocking devaluation of Black American men.

  • Christopher Lebron

Dulltopia

On the dystopian impulses of slow cinema.

  • Mark Bould

The Obsessions of Hitchcock, Welles, and Kubrick

A new book takes on the titans of twentieth-century cinema, fetishes and all.

  • Jonathan Kirshner

Transparents

When your father is trans, memoir is both personal and political.

  • Judith Levine

The Passions

Tilda Swinton, icon of indy cinema, is masterful in Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash.

  • Alan A. Stone

Pilgrim’s Progress

Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups is lost in its own symbolism.

  • Alan A. Stone

A Better Self

In Paolo Sorrentino's Youth, the crossroads of despair and integrity.

  • Alan A. Stone

Blooming, Buzzing Experience

The Wonders subverts the typical female coming-of-age story.

  • Alan A. Stone

An Honest Woman

Isabel Coixet's Learning to Drive

  • Alan A. Stone

Park that Lark

Michael Almereyda's Cymbeline

  • Alan A. Stone

Can She Act?

Olivier Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria

  • Alan A. Stone

Lav Diaz’s Quiet Storm

Lav Diaz’s singular approach to history is liberated from the shackles of business-oriented film.

  • Adam Katzman

Decide for Yourself

Truth in the films of Errol Morris.

  • Randolph Lewis

Human Frailties

Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu

  • Alan A. Stone

The Ugly Truth

Even if the facts are wrong, the feelings in Selma are right.

  • Alan A. Stone
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