Critics at Large | The New Yorker

The first episode of “Saturday Night Live,” which aired in October of 1975, was a loose, scrappy affair. The sketches were experimental, almost absurdist, and the program was peppered with standup fro...

20 Feb 202550min

A few years back, novels classed as “romantasy”—a portmanteau of “romance” and “fantasy”—might have seemed destined to attract only niche appeal. But since the pandemic, the genre has proved nothing s...

13 Feb 202553min

David Lynch, who died last month at seventy-eight, was a director of images—one whose distinctive sensibility and instinct for combining the grotesque and the mundane have influenced a generation of a...

6 Feb 202551min

In 1954, a young David Attenborough made his début as the star of a new nature show called “Zoo Quest.” The docuseries, which ran for nearly a decade on the BBC, was a sensation that set Attenborough ...

30 Jan 202548min

Westward expansion has been mythologized onscreen for more than a century—and its depiction has always been entwined with the politics and anxieties of the era. In the 1939 film “Stagecoach,” John Way...

16 Jan 202550min

The first person is a narrative style as old as storytelling itself—one that, at its best, allows us to experience the world through another person’s eyes. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson ...

9 Jan 202550min

Margaret Talbot, writing in The New Yorker in 2005, recounted that when animators at Pixar got stuck on a project they’d file into a screening room to watch a film by Hayao Miyazaki. Best known for wo...

26 Des 202448min

This year, high-profile failures abounded. Take, for example, Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project “Megalopolis,” which cost a hundred and forty million dollars to make—and brought in less than ten ...

19 Des 202449min