Certainties and Possibilities

It wasn’t a banner year for the world’s most important film festival, but there were gems among the twenty-two films contending for the Palme d’Or.

More than half a century after “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac is still a literary celebrity. But fame undid the man I knew.

From guys trying to make it past women’s six-foot filter on dating apps to basketball players hoping to get drafted, men continue to exaggerate how tall they are.

A humane study of how artists have captured our canine companions becomes a meditation on sympathy, trust, and the virtues we have bred them to display.

In boyhood, guilt was a constant companion. I stopped mentioning the quarters that Mr. Wood put into my pocket.

It’s what most of us are, most of the time. Shouldn’t it be enough?

“The Last Temptation of Christ,” the director’s 1988 epic, became one of the first victims of a new conservative playbook—and set the template for the culture wars of today.

In “People of the 20th Century,” the photographer set out to document every type and profession in the fading epoch of prewar Germany.

Calling something “didactic” has become grounds for immediate dismissal. But do the merits of works with an educational bent—from “The Pitt” to “Elizabeth Costello”—suggest we should think again?

For the critic Leslie Fiedler, the country’s best and worst fiction was shaped by visions of escape from society—and therefore from maturity.

Boots Riley’s zany movies combine pop aesthetics with radical politics.

The women pop up again and again, in canvas after canvas, like a random intrusive thought that refuses to go away, or a masturbatory fixation that both disturbs and excites.