The 2015 Oscars

A Song Against Jihad

In the hands of Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako and his superb cadre of actors in Timbuktu—many of whom are non-professionals—defiance of extremism is vested with such moral authority as to make the jihadists look risible.

February 22, 2015

A Film Without a Country

Films that have won in the Best Foreign Film category at the Oscars have usually satisfied a taste for otherness. The case of Human Capital, which was Italy’s entry for this year’s Oscar but was not nominated by the Academy, may be instructive in this regard.

February 21, 2015

The Great American Shooter

While Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper has drawn a large and diverse audience, there is no consensus as to what the movie means.

February 13, 2015

Hollywood & Truth

Perhaps my skepticism about holding Hollywood to rigorous standards of veracity has to do with the fact that I grew up during an era in which “historical” films routinely departed far—and often comically—from reality.

February 10, 2015

Some Different Ways of Looking at Selma

‘Selma’ reminds us that the book is still the only medium in which you can make a complicated argument

February 19, 2015 issue

Birdman’s Comic Horror

Birdman charges forward, headlong and without stopping, alternately scourging and exalting its audience with the genuine pain and the holy-fool ridiculousness of a “washed-up” former superhero.

January 28, 2015

The Passion of Marion Cotillard

Two Days, One Night traffics in suspense and is a sort of thriller. But as a search for a lost (or stolen) livelihood, it is also a descendant of The Bicycle Thief, the neo-realist classic that implies a world in which “the poor must steal from each other to survive.”

January 18, 2015

‘Selma’ vs. History

By distorting an essential truth about the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King over the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Selma has opened an overdue debate over whether and how much truth the movie industry owes to the public.

January 8, 2015

Pynchon’s Blue Shadow

To say that Paul Thomas Anderson has faithfully and successfully adapted Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice to the screen is another way of saying that he has changed it into something entirely different.

January 3, 2015

Russia: Man vs. System

The corruption, inequality, and ultimate hopelessness that drive the plot of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan are becoming only more evident and pronounced in the current meltdown of the Russian economy.

December 26, 2014

Getting Alan Turing Wrong

The Imitation Game not only fatally miscasts the mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing as a character—it also completely destroys any coherent telling of what he and his colleagues were trying to do.

December 19, 2014

The Question of Edward Snowden

Laura Poitras’s documentary ‘Citizenfour’

December 4, 2014 issue

Turner at Twilight

Late Turner: Painting Set Free, showing at Tate, Britain, is a fittingly autumnal show, focusing on Turner’s life from his sixtieth birthday in 1835 to his death in 1851.

November 13, 2014

The Hard Work of Marriage

David Fincher’s ‘Gone Girl’

December 4, 2014 issue

Snowden's Self-Surveillance

Laura Poitras’s documentary Citizenfour unwittingly reflects the tenor of the digital age not just in its subject matter, but in its style.

October 25, 2014

‘Making Real What We Cannot See’

Richard Linklater’s ‘Boyhood’

September 25, 2014 issue