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
· 16 min read
Cinema
A collection of 132 posts
Scandalous Monogamy and Faithful Infidelity
On eros and marriage.
Marilyn Simon
· 13 min read
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
· 14 min read
Architecture as Revenge
Brady Corbet’s panoramic epic, ‘The Brutalist,’ may be technically brilliant, but it is a cheat and a fraud.
Charlotte Allen
· 15 min read
American Surrealist
A tribute to David Lynch (1946–2025).
Benjamin Kerstein
· 8 min read
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
· 11 min read
Unmasked and Anonymous
A brief history of Bob Dylan on screen.
Benjamin Kerstein
· 18 min read
Printing the Legend: A Review of A Complete Unknown
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
· 15 min read
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
· 5 min read
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
· 13 min read
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
· 30 min read
Megalopolis: Bloated, Outré—and Brilliant
Like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, it’s chaos alright—but it’s a dazzling chaos.
Ralph Leonard
· 8 min read
Decline and Folly
‘Megalopolis’ and the rise and fall of Francis Ford Coppola.
Oliver Jia
· 14 min read
‘Bright Lights, Big City’ at Forty
Jay McInerney’s debut novel was the first work of fiction to explore yuppie culture, and its success changed American publishing.
Kevin Mims
· 16 min read
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
· 11 min read