Film

Browse our essays and reviews on film and TV.

American Sniper: Patriotism Is Personal

Patriotism, as brilliant as the gold tridents pounded into a SEAL’s coffin lid, outshines all flaws.

  • Judith Levine

Integrity and Despair

Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman.

  • Alan A. Stone

The Natural

Richard Linklater's Boyhood

  • Alan A. Stone

Submitting to Truth

Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida

  • Alan A. Stone

Are You Jewish?

John Turturro's Fading Gigolo.

  • Alan A. Stone

The Lost Girls

Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen.

  • Alan A. Stone

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Living the Dream

Arnaud Desplechin's Jimmy P.

  • Alan A. Stone

Loser

Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis.

  • Alan A. Stone

Haven in a Heartless World

Alan Stone reviews Enough Said

  • Alan A. Stone

You Won’t See This on TV

The truth about America’s broken criminal justice system is significantly more interesting than scriptwriters’ fiction.

  • Seth Abramson

Subject of Study

If there is a moral limit to artistic license, director Alice Winocour has gone beyond it in Augustine.

  • Alan A. Stone

The Greater Gatsby

Fitzgerald's novel is overrated, but the new film version deserves more credit than it has received.

  • Alan A. Stone

The Price of Vengeance

Settling the Cinematic Torture Debate

  • Alan A. Stone

A Love Story

Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. 

  • Alan A. Stone

Black Like Me

  • Alan A. Stone

The Allen Files

Midnight in Paris earned Woody Allen his fourth Oscar and was the biggest box office success in his long and productive filmmaking career.

  • Alan A. Stone

Serbia’s Brokeback Mountain

Srđan Dragojević’s film about the aspirations of gay Serbs may finally be puncturing a culture of homophobia.

  • Paul Hockenos

Arcadia for the Aged

John Madden, the distinguished British director of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, tells us that his film has the structure of a Shakespearean comedy.

  • Alan A. Stone

Choosing Love

The Beat That My Heart Skipped by Jacques Audiard.

  • Alan A. Stone

Forgiving Woody

Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

  • Alan A. Stone

Never So Free

Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation portrays an Iranian divorce under sharia law with sensitivity and pathos.

  • Alan A. Stone

The Cure

Can doctors change how they think?

  • Suzanne Gordon

When Critics Mattered

On Pauline Kael, Robert Ebert, and seventies film.

  • Jonathan Kirshner

An Acquired Taste

Swinton gives her all to the martyred victim in We Need to Talk about Kevin.

  • Alan A. Stone
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