The great British director Terence Davies is a cinematic archeologist, using images to reveal the enduring power of the past in the present day. In the clip above I discuss his 2000 feature, “The House of Mirth,” his adaptation of the novel by Edith Wharton—set nearly a century earlier, in New York—which unpeels sharp and poignant paradoxes of bygone norms, indeed, of social and aesthetic life overall. The formality of relationships, the harshly judgmental and moralizing repression of wide swaths of authentic emotion, the enforced rigidity of manners all combine to torment a free-spirited, open-hearted woman such as the movie’s protagonist—and also to inspire an ornamental graciousness, a sublime surface sheen, and an exquisite intricacy of artifice such as our own freer and less-inhibited age is unlikely to inspire. His new film, “The Deep Blue Sea,” starring Rachel Weisz, is slated for a December release here; I’m deeply impatient to see it.
Goings On
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week, online, in N.Y.C., and beyond. Paid subscribers also receive book picks.
The Current Cinema
“Love Lies Bleeding” and the Perils of Genre
Crackling performances from Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian can’t quite disguise a thinness of characterization in Rose Glass’s neo-noir.
By Richard Brody
The Current Cinema
The Sterile Spectacle of “Dune: Part Two”
Denis Villeneuve’s sequel is better than its predecessor, but only in a few extravagant moments does it rise above proficiency and flirt with transcendence.
By Justin Chang
The Front Row
Med Hondo’s Vital Political Cinema Comes to New York
The Mauritanian filmmaker, long active in France, reveals the legacy of colonialism in society at large and in the art of movies.
By Richard Brody
The Current Cinema
The Enchanting Archaeological Romance of “La Chimera”
The ghosts of the past haunt Alice Rohrwacher’s fourth feature, which stars Josh O’Connor as a tomb raider nursing a broken heart.
By Justin Chang