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
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
Roman Polanski’s ‘Chinatown’ Fifty Years On Chinatown is noir at its bleakest, yet most stylish. Ralph Leonard 13 Aug 2024 · 9 min read
Roger Corman: A Filmmaker’s Filmmaker An account of all the lives Corman touched, the careers he helped to jump-start, and the genres he pioneered would fill several books. Jacob Bielecki 6 Jun 2024 · 12 min read
How Superhero Franchises Are Killing Original Cinema Most new movies feature neither good storytelling nor innovative filmmaking. Instead, they rely on the nostalgia of ready-made fan bases. Jacob Bielecki 7 Dec 2023 · 7 min read
History on Horseback: Napoleon Bonaparte The French emperor and military commander played a pivotal role in an epochal transformation. Ralph Leonard 4 Dec 2023 · 16 min read
‘The Princess Bride’ at 50 A look back at William Goldman’s bonkers metafictional novel ‘The Princess Bride,’ which later became a much-loved family film. Kevin Mims 19 Jun 2023 · 18 min read
Belafonte Reappraised Neither hagiographers nor haters of the late musician, actor, and activist have managed to get him right. Ronald Radosh 20 May 2023 · 18 min read
Social Panic at Sundance Meg Smaker’s film about the rehabilitation of former Guantanamo terror suspects was nuanced and sympathetic. But the mob didn’t care. M. Pollino 14 Oct 2022 · 8 min read
Guilty and Insane Dissociative Identity Disorder and the riddle of human responsibility. Daniel Kriegman 29 Jul 2022 · 20 min read
The Delia Demolition Why is the Atlantic slinging mud at the 72-year-old author of ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ on the eve of the film’s release? Kevin Mims 19 Jul 2022 · 19 min read
The Subversive Conservatism of Rocky Balboa Rocky's vision of a good life was humble, traditional, and local. Stewart Slater 15 Jul 2022 · 8 min read
B.S. Moss and the Dawn of the Movie-Palace Era Although the vaudeville circuits would last through the 1920s, the way was now paved for impressive purpose-built movie houses with proper lighting and sound that would exhibit first-rate popular entertainment to general audiences. Charles B. Moss Jr. and Jonathan Kay 23 Dec 2021 · 16 min read
Does Christine Brown Deserve to Burn in Hell? In the pitiless moral universe of writer-director Sam Raimi’s 2009 horror film ‘Drag Me to Hell,’ guilt isn’t easily absolved and debts must always be paid in the end. Jamie Palmer 31 Oct 2021 · 12 min read
Revisiting ‘Wake in Fright’, A Peculiarly Australian Kind of Hell Five decades after its release, Wake in Fright remains a brutally captivating reminder that modernity is just a thin veneer over the darker recesses of the human heart. Ryan Anderson 28 Sep 2021 · 16 min read
