Arts

East Side Story

Josh Safdie’s new film, starring Timothée Chalamet, is both a character study of monomania and a moving fable of how the American century of table tennis was lost.

December 18, 2025

Frantic Realism

Paul Thomas Anderson fits a generation’s worth of cineplex joys into One Battle After Another, but the revolution refuses to get off the couch.

November 20, 2025 issue

Mary Shelley’s ‘Hideous Progeny’

Through Mary Shelley’s letters, journal, and work-in-progress, we can trace the development of Frankenstein from a simple ghost story to her most famous novel.

November 20, 2025 issue

Moon Over Miami

Barry Jenkins’s film Moonlight isn’t trying to be realistic about anything, even as it confounds what we expect from stories about young black men, starting with the film’s texture, its intricate soundtrack, tantric pace, and beauty frame by frame.

April 20, 2017 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

Born Too Late

The Last Emperor is a spectacular film photographed in brilliant color. It is also a moral drama with controversial political overtones of great ambiguity.

February 18, 1988 issue

A Dissent on ‘Schindler’s List’

Oskar Schindler was an exotic exception, and Stephen Spielberg lets viewers take comfort in his virtuous behavior, but the Holocaust raises terrible questions about humanity, and it is these questions that the director did not ask.

April 21, 1994 issue

B-flat Movie

To give Amadeus every benefit of the doubt, we might assume that the presentation of Mozart as a fool is an intended irony, and congratulate the director for having chosen the best way to fail with an insoluble problem.

April 11, 1985 issue

Letter from ‘Manhattan’

The characters in Manhattan and Annie Hall and Interiors are, with one exception, presented as adults, but their concerns and conversations are those of clever children acting out a yearbook fantasy of adult life.

August 16, 1979 issue

‘I Wanted to Paint What I Know’: An Interview with Jordan Casteel

Casteel’s first solo exhibition in New York City, ‘Within Reach,’ is a collection of large-scale oil portraits, on view at the New Museum for just one more week.

December 26, 2020

An Interview with Art Spiegelman

If you were drawing Donald Trump as an animal, who would he be? A very conventional part of my brain goes, “He’s a… wild boar.” Except that pigs are intelligent. Now I have drawn him as bloated frog. More recently, I drew him as a large turd.

April 13, 2018

An Interview with Artist Chloë Bass

I first encountered the work of conceptual artist Chloë Bass when I came upon a reflective billboard—a giant mirror—planted in the grass of Harlem’s St. Nicholas Park, with the words “How much of love is attention?” written across it.

August 19, 2020