Movies

The 2024 New York Film Festival featured schmaltz, biopic clichés, and enduring brilliance.

In the third installment of our summer series, we're discussing formalism and humanism with the help of Françoise Gilot and Éric Rohmer.

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Griffin Oleynick and Anthony Domestico revive their celebrated summer readings and screenings series.

Exuding a dark pleasure in its portrait of America's civic agony, 'Civil War' opts for shock value over substance.

Poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini believed in the importance of being yourself, which means being unrecognizable.

The time is right for the new biopic of Mother Cabrini, the patron saint of immigrants and the first American citizen to be canonized.

Justine Triet’s ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ asks: What are we to do when we reach the limits of our ability to know?

The films of Alexander Payne shelter a menagerie of the bumbling, the henpecked, the ineffectual, the distressed, and the depressed.

In ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ Martin Scorsese serves up an inversion of history as we have come to know it, revealing his larger aim—the correction of memory.

Aki Kaurismäki’s ‘Fallen Leaves’ displays the director's wry humor, spare style, and focus on social inequality.

What explains the traditionalist Catholic infatuation with ‘The Exorcist’?

Standout films at this year’s New York Film Festival offer neither escape nor catharsis.

‘Contempt’ is Godard’s greatest attempt to bring order to the world of cinema, to tame its commercial side and create a beautiful film.

‘Oppenheimer’ vitiates the drama of its subject matter, reducing tragedy to mere chronicle.

Stereotypical Barbie is everything, which is another way of saying that she is nothing.

‘The Dirty Divide’ depicts the beauty and the hell of unhoused life on Skid Row. The film has the feel of a prayer.

Dorothy Fortenberry, from the writers’ strike picket line, describes what it looks like when solidarity is put into practice.

Christian Petzold’s tenth feature film takes human drama as the medium of historical upheaval.

Celine Song’s debut film, ‘Past Lives,’ suggests that a past can take on dimensions more profound precisely because it is left behind.

Cyril Schäublin’s latest film—capturing the efforts of 19th-century anarchist watchmakers—dramatizes resistance to tech-reliant, capitalist control.

For filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi, Pope Francis is a revolutionary, a man who calls on us to imagine a better world. But being a revolutionary comes with loneliness.

New films by Steven Spielberg and Charlotte Wells offer two profoundly different views of film’s relationship to memory.

A recent spate of “eat-the-rich” shows and films—including the Oscar-nominated ‘Triangle of Sadness’—fail to offer any alternative to the ethos of the ultra-wealthy.

Noah Baumbach’s film adaptation of “White Noise” neutralizes the sweeping ideas and absurd plot of DeLillo’s novel.

In ‘Tár,’ Cate Blanchett displays a capacity for jagged intensity that is by turns commanding and disturbed.

Melodramatic plots and ethical dilemmas are at the center of the movies of Iranian film director Asghar Farhadi.

A new documentary explores Fr. Jim Martin’s LGBT ministry

Terence Davies’s ‘Benediction’ explores disappointment with a world that has not lived up to the sacrifices it demands.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film, ‘Memoria,’ honors slow changes and the overlap of the material and spiritual worlds.

In these stories, Church leaders face the fault line between the modern world and an ancient faith.

Aaron Sorkin’s ultimately complacent worldview, reiterated in ‘Being the Ricardos,’ doesn’t quite resonate in our tumultuous time.

Despite its epic Western setting, ‘The Power of the Dog’ is more parlor than prairie.

The Greek filmmaker Nikos Papatakis tried to make his audience as uncomfortable as possible—and usually succeeded.

The Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters stood up for themselves, and for social justice, in the vibrant L.A. culture of the 1960s.

An HBO docuseries and a new memoir reimagine popular accounts of abusive artists from the perspective of survivors.

A new documentary explores the power of Black music at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969.

Wong Kar-wai’s films explore obsession, suppressed desire, and the unsettling undercurrents running beneath composed surfaces.

Reading celebrated director Billy Wilder’s journalism is like glimpsing the percolating brain of the genius to come.

A Showtime documentary uses baseball to highlight contemporary border issues. But béisbol has always been a migration narrative on its own terms.

‘Mank,’ a new movie about the politics behind ‘Citizen Kane,’ focuses on Upton Sinclair—a friend of Commonweal’s founding editor.

Who is a freedom fighter and who is a terrorist—and who gets to decide?

Frederick Wiseman’s ‘City Hall’ explores the performance, promotion, and presentation necessary to running a major city.

In the final installment of our series, we consider two landmark essays on Homer’s Iliad alongside Costa-Gavras’s Greek political thriller, ‘Z.’

Abel Ferrara’s new film examines domesticity and its dissolution through a protagonist who see-saws between utter collapse and calm self-awareness.

Many films have been made about the senselessness and brutality of war. But Elem Klimov’s ‘Come and See’ deserves renewed attention for its masterful ambiguity.