Cinema - Quillette

Scene from the film, with the Count in front of Notre Dame. In the foreground, dying men.

The Many Faces of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’

Alexandre Dumas’s novel is by turns an adventure story, a paean to bourgeois values, and a Greek epic. No wonder it continues to fascinate.

Stewart Slater

14 Mar 2025 · 9 min read

Karla Sofía Gascon is in her thirties. She has long, mid-brown hair and is wearing a colourful outfit.

Gender Bending Mobster Mash

With ‘Emilia Pérez,’ Jacques Audiard created—intentionally or unintentionally—a subversive assault on every plank of the current transgender credo.

Charlotte Allen

4 Mar 2025 · 16 min read

Scandalous Monogamy and Faithful Infidelity

On eros and marriage.

Marilyn Simon

14 Feb 2025 · 12 min read

A middle-aged man on stage in blackface, wearing a suit. Black and white image.

Mammy Dearest

Richard Bernstein’s new book about Al Jolson and ‘The Jazz Singer’ offers a thoughtful reconsideration of an unfairly reviled cultural landmark.

Graham Daseler

6 Feb 2025 · 14 min read

Adrien Brody as architect László Tóth is looking down at the camera, smoking, surrounded by sparks.

Architecture as Revenge

Brady Corbet’s panoramic epic, ‘The Brutalist,’ may be technically brilliant, but it is a cheat and a fraud.

Charlotte Allen

3 Feb 2025 · 15 min read

A still from a black-and-white film, featuring a man and woman in formal dress.

American Surrealist

A tribute to David Lynch (1946–2025).

Benjamin Kerstein

21 Jan 2025 · 7 min read

A portrait of a beautiful young Chinese actress with a fringe.

A Perfectly Charming Chinese Girl

Against long odds and in the face of exclusionary casting, Anna May Wong bequeathed us an extraordinary cinematic legacy.

Thomas Doherty

9 Jan 2025 · 11 min read

The photo shows a young Dylan in stetson and cowboy outfit in a saloon.

Unmasked and Anonymous

A brief history of Bob Dylan on screen.

Benjamin Kerstein

1 Jan 2025 · 18 min read

Timothee Chalamet is a white man in his 20s, at a microphone, wearing dark glasses, with curly brown ha

Printing the Legend

The naysayers are dead wrong about James Mangold’s remarkable new film about Bob Dylan and the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s.

Ronald Radosh

26 Dec 2024 · 15 min read

A cartoon black cat with big eyes on what looks like a gondola in Venice.

The Eerie Beauty of ‘Flow’

Gints Zilbalodis’s beautiful dystopian story feels like the start of a new era in cinema, or at least the invitation to one.

Roy Wayne Meredith III

4 Dec 2024 · 5 min read

Denzel Washington in Roman costume. He is a middle-aged black man with close cropped hair wearing robes and jewelle

Games and Thrones

The real history of the era portrayed in Gladiator II is much more interesting, tumultuous, and murderous than Scott’s simpleminded yarn.

Charlotte Allen

4 Dec 2024 · 13 min read

An actor in Roman costume with a gold crown. He is a man in his 50s, blonde hair, blue eyes wearing purple and gold.

Savage Entertainment

A new version of Tinto Brass and Bob Guccione’s notorious 1979 film ‘Caligula’ provides a valuable record of one of the most fascinating disasters in cinema history.

Jaspreet Singh Boparai

14 Nov 2024 · 30 min read

Adam Driver as Caesar Catilina and Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia Cicero.

Megalopolis: Bloated, Outré—and Brilliant

Like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, it’s chaos alright—but it’s a dazzling chaos.

Ralph Leonard

13 Nov 2024 · 8 min read

A woman in a yellow coat stands in front of a row of lockers. She is attractive, fifties, carries an expensive handbag.

All Hail the New Flesh

For all its decorative asides about predatory male sexuality, ‘The Substance’ is most coherently understood as a morality tale about the folly of feminist illusions.

Charlotte Allen

1 Nov 2024 · 11 min read

Sonny Side Up

Al Pacino’s personal life has been a bit of a train wreck, but his new memoir leaves no doubt that acting has been the most important thing in his life.

Kevin Mims

28 Oct 2024 · 21 min read