Nation Topics - Film | The Nation

Were I to tell you that Rules of Engagement features a protracted fistfight between Samuel L.

In the role of New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell--source and subject alike of Joe Gould's Secret--Stanley Tucci adopts the hesitant drawl of a displaced Southern aristocrat, who goe

If you squint long enough at Claire Denis's amazing Beau Travail--you'll have to squint, given the African sunlight--you will make out the faint contour of a story.

Star vehicle?

Last night a teenager killed himself below my bedroom window. I heard it happen: first a crescendo of police sirens coming up the avenue at two in the morning, then a crash.

It's a sign of age: Mention 1985, and I will sometimes think you're talking about last year.

The first thing Jim Jarmusch asks you to do in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is to look up and down.

For someone who misspent his youth in film societies and revival houses, where mushrooms develop more readily than social skills, a job as a movie reviewer wonderfully eases the burden of small t

I like a filmmaker who walks you into a story.

Bette Midler got her first starring role in the movies in 1979, playing the lead in The Rose, a thinly disguised biopic about Janis Joplin.