Cinema - Quillette

“Be Vigilant, America”

Two forgotten films from 1942 about Japanese internment offer a window into the shameful nativism of wartime America.

Thomas Doherty

6 Mar 2023 · 10 min read

A Bore of a Blockbuster

Next time, one hopes, James Cameron will focus as much on the story he tells as the means he uses to tell it.

Allan Stratton

19 Jan 2023 · 7 min read

The Radicalization of the Film Canon

Sight and Sound’s 2022 poll is a sign of the times.

Adrian Nguyen

18 Dec 2022 · 12 min read

Startling Intimations of Greatness

As we await the release of Woody Allen’s 50th feature film, his biographer looks back on the career of one of America’s great cinematic artists.

David Evanier

21 Nov 2022 · 25 min read

Ken Kesey and the Rush to Deinstitutionalization

Whatever the literary strengths of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the book has done much to harm both the mentally ill and their communities.

Stephen Eide

14 Nov 2022 · 11 min read

Getting Fletch Wrong

Jon Hamm’s portrayal is an improvement on Chevy Chase’s goofball routine, but still bears little relation to the amoral cad in Gregory McDonald’s novels.

Kevin Mims

23 Sep 2022 · 16 min read

Adult Fantasy of Youth

A look back at Bertolucci’s 2003 film, The Dreamers.

Marilyn Simon

18 Aug 2022 · 13 min read

“I Believe in America”

Fifty Years of ‘The Godfather‘

Graham Daseler

22 Jul 2022 · 13 min read

Undiminished by Decadence

I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s and I’m happy to report that, for the most part, television and mainstream cinema today are orders of magnitude better than they were in my salad days.

Kevin Mims

20 May 2022 · 14 min read

Art Is Not Therapy

Something is flattened when our understanding of art is asked to serve the logic of a medical diagnosis, which sees the messiness of the human condition as a malady to be cured.

Jasmine Hu-Hollingshead

12 May 2022 · 10 min read

The Western Reinvented. Again.

It has been 30 years since a Western last won the Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards. That was in 1992 and the film was Unforgiven [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105695/], directed by Clint Eastwood, who also starred in it alongside Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, and Richard Harris.

Kevin Mims

25 Mar 2022 · 8 min read

Fatal Vision: Joel Coen’s ‘Macbeth’

“I am in this earthly world, where to do harm / Is often laudable, to do good / Sometime accounted dangerous folly.” So says Lady Macduff in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Moments later, she and her entire family—innocents all—are slaughtered. The triumph of Joel Coen’s film adaptation is that it

Marilyn Simon

19 Jan 2022 · 7 min read

In Toronto's Weirdest Cinema, a Portrait of the Artist I'd Never Become

You’ve probably heard of the Toronto International Film Festival, which, before the pandemic, was annually attracting almost 500,000 attendees. But you’ve probably never heard of Toronto’s equally venerable Cineforum, whose weekly attendance has usually been closer to five. The Cineforum is an indie theatre run by

Adam Zivo

18 Jan 2022 · 9 min read

B.S. Moss and the Dawn of the Movie-Palace Era

Charles B. Moss Jr. and Jonathan Kay

23 Dec 2021 · 15 min read

Brutal and Unreformed—Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Straw Dogs’ at 50

Charlotte Allen

15 Dec 2021 · 32 min read