David Denby

A group of English nuns (led by Deborah Kerr) ascend to a former pleasure palace in the Himalayas and try to establish a school, but they are baffled by native superstition and sensuality, not to mention by the taunting presence of a virile Englishman (David Farrar). Though the premise of “Black Narcissus” (screening at MOMA on Oct. 26-28) may seem like a wheeze, this 1947 production, written and directed by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is a triumph of design, color, and mo…

When I interviewed David Cronenberg at The New Yorker Festival in October, he presented himself as a serene bourgeois artist—a mild Canadian who liked to…

“This Is Not a Film,” “Wanderlust,” and “Safe House.”

May I add a few words to what Leo Carey has eloquently written about the great German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who died, last Friday, at the age of eighty-six? Classical nut that I am, I have always had trouble warming up to lieder—the most rarified and delicate of all genres. I generally enjoy a lot of complicated things going on—the many strands of a symphony or tone poem; opera’s mix of singers, chorus, and seething orchestra; even the four voices of a string quartet, joining, parti…

Well, you can’t get more official than that. After asking the movies to lead children to light, the First Lady announced “Argo” as Best Picture from the White House, as close to a benediction as this bizarrely Popeless moment could offer. I like Michelle Obama just fine, but the notion of an officially crowned winner about a C.I.A. rescue operation in Iran makes me just as queasy as the suggestion, in “Zero Dark Thirty,” that torture played a (small) role in the elimination of Osama bin Laden. Y…

This post has been updated. Movie critics enjoy a position of privilege virtually unknown to the rest of American society: they can say what they want and write as nastily as they want, as frequently as they want (the Internet is an extraordinary goad to fiery eloquence), and no one will punish them for it. If uttered publicly in a corporate or government job, the merest hostile aside might get someone fired, or demoted, or stalled, but critics can question a movie actor or director’s competence…

If you want to understand what Outpost Mest Malak felt like on a blistering day, you have to see these films.

In public, Donald Trump has three facial expressions—no more than three because life, for him, is quite simple. Implacable Resolution: The increasingly familiar chin-up, narrow-eyed Mussolini frown. When Trump listens to a hostile question, his lips are closed, his head squares up to a solid block of orange clay, his corn-silk hair surges resolutely forward and backward at the same time. Expressionless, he nods as the hostile sentence is delivered. By evoking Mussolini’s thrusting chin, I don’t…

So Lily goes to New York, gets a job at a large midtown bank, and immediately begins sleeping her way to the top. (Literally: in between short scenes of seduction, the camera tilts up the outside of the bank building, as she ascends from the personnel department to filing and on to mortgages.) After two of her lovers wind up dead, she nabs the bank founder’s grandson (George Brent), and attains jewelry, furs, Paris, a maid, and a chauffeured car. When he gets in trouble at his company, she refus…

In St. Louis, Houdini and his assistants dragged onto the stage a sixty-gallon milk can, a larger version of the ones delivered to grocery stores. They filled it with water, the excess slopping over the sides as Houdini climbed in. There is a photograph of the act in which Houdini’s unsmiling face sticks out above the can (his knees were pulled up to his chest). Members of the local police—with helmets reaching down around their ears and impressively ugly mustaches—stand to the side, looking lik…