Arts & Culture

One reason why Isabelle Huppert makes suffering so compelling onscreen is her sheer … well, “unflappability” isn’t quite the right word. It’s a kind of ironic distance, perhaps: The actress can convey curiosity, bewilderment and coolness all at once, even as she deals with the most agonizing of circumstances. But…

Martin Scorsese opens his foreword to the latest edition of Shusaku Endo’s Silence with a simple, impossible question: “How do you tell the story of Christian faith?” The director isn’t presumptuous enough to present his adaptation of that beloved novel as a definitive answer, but his film does read as…

Parents be warned: J. A. Bayona and Patrick Ness’ kid-meets-beast coming-of-age fantasy is a reclamation of fairy stories from the reassuring fiction of happily ever after. In a lineup of holiday releases — or, soon, a streaming queue — this tale of a bullied Irish boy whose best friend is…

Accepting the Welt Literature Prize in Berlin on November 10 of this year, the novelist Zadie Smith said, “Time travel is a discretionary art: a pleasure trip for some and a horror story for others.” She was speaking, of course, of the conviction among so many white people that there’s…

Like craft beers or your news feed, Netflix’s niche-viewing categories are forever growing more micro-specific. Its new drama series, an eight-part bafflement called The OA, could only be categorized as a Sexually Frank Spiritual Locked-Room Suburban Afterlife Mad Scientist Communitarian Interpretive-Dance Ripped-From-the-Headlines Horror Puzzle Mystery. Its flavors never unite into…

“With all respect, sir, may I ask, who are you?” “What you see before you is a man, a simple monk.” “Are you the Lord Buddha?” “I believe I am a reflection, like the moon on water. When you see me, and I try to be a good man, you…

Once upon a time, in the dark ages of not-that-long-ago, foreign television was a mysterious land beyond our reach. Aside from the occasional British import, the wonders of international series were limited to those equipped with multi-region DVD players. Scandinavian gloom mostly stayed in Scandinavia. Thanks to streaming, it’s now…

What does it take for a woman to win the trust it takes to become an action director? For Anna Foerster, it took two decades, an expert’s knowledge of visual effects and cinematography and a directing gig on key episodes of a cult television show — Starz’s Outlander. Now she’s…

Like many people after Carrie Fisher’s untimely passing on Tuesday, Dec. 27, I was moved to revisit Postcards From the Edge, the Mike Nichols–directed film that Fisher adapted from her own novel. This was the sole feature screenwriting credit for the actress-novelist, despite the fact that she was for decades…

Our film critics found lots of films they liked in 2016.

The top film and television stories of 2016.

Featuring the return of the She-Wolf Pack.