Film

When Mel Gibson’s ultra-violent, ultra-religious Passion of the Christ made $612 million worldwide, it was not earning its money from teenagers looking for a night out. Despite its R rating, churchgoers were being bused to theaters by the millions, thanks to the heavy support it received from evangelical Christian groups. Everyone from Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell to Pat Robertson and Chuck Colson came out in support of the film, although the Pope’s supposed endorsement — "it is as it was" — was denied by the Vatican. Yet faith-based films have quietly been big business in Hollywood for decades now.

The thing about a new M. Night Shyamalan movie is that, going in, one never knows whether it’ll be “one of the good ones.” Few directors have quite as uneven a track record: in the wake of the much-loved The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village, Shyamalan helmed a string of disasters, culminating in the big-budget catastrophe that was 2013’s After Earth. On the other hand, 2016’s Split and 2019’s Glass were both great. Knock at the Cabin falls somewhere in the middle. The film centers on a gay couple, Andrew and Eric (Ben Aldridge and Jonathan Groff, respectively), and their adopted daughter Wen (Kristen Cui), who are forced to confront a nightmare scenario. Holed up in a lonely cabin in the forest, they are accosted by a quartet of heavily armed outsiders.

Could it be that 2023’s most engaging film centers on two ninety-year-olds (give or take) from the publishing world who have engaged in a decades-long debate over the uses and abuses of the semicolon? Why, yes, it could. Director Lizzie Gottlieb’s Turn Every Page is a charming chronicle of the fifty-year collaboration between her father, the famed editor Robert Gottlieb, and our nation’s finest historian, Robert Caro. The two shy, bookish products of New York City have, for half a century now, collaborated on two of the most influential biographies of the past half century: The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York and the four-volume (and counting) The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

The news that Alec Baldwin has been charged with involuntary manslaughter, following the fatal shooting of Halyna Hutchins with a prop gun on the set of Rust, has come as a genuine shock to the film industry. Since the accident in October 2021, Baldwin has loudly protested his lack of culpability, even going so far as to sue the filmmakers for failing to check that the gun was not loaded. His career did not seem harmed in any noticeable way: he has several films either in production or awaiting release, and even made a brief vocal cameo in the much-acclaimed Tár last year.

As a film critic and historian who's written for Sight and Sound since 2011, I like to think that the greatest films of all time are always on my mind, but, in truth, they were particularly on my mind last summer. Last July, I received the official word that I was among the select group of critics picked to partake the Sight and Sound critics' poll to decide the greatest films ever made; a survey the British magazine first convened in 1952 and has repeated on a once-per-decade basis ever since. In the weeks before my deadline to vote, I meditated on what constituted a great film with unusual intensity and self-reflection.

In March 2021, during his last major interview, Jean-Luc Godard reiterated a previous point about the coronavirus being a form of communication. “At first, I thought that production was the main aspect of cinema, and I realized distribution was more important, today more than before. Distribution has choked production by pretending to be at the service of the audience...The virus in its own way, distributes. Today, it would be interesting to know how the virus produces, but we only care about what it distributes.

Later this week, probably the world’s greatest living film director will celebrate his eightieth birthday. However he celebrates — whether in the company of friends and family in his no doubt opulent Manhattan home, or working on his eagerly awaited new film Killers of the Flower Moon — Martin Scorsese can reach his milestone age in the confidence that his position in cinematic history is assured forever. For a man so steeped in the art and practice of filmmaking — and who has made several excellent documentaries about movies — it must be intensely gratifying for Scorsese to be aware that he is that rarest of persons, a living legend, whose contributions to film will live forever.

The only time I ever saw Angela Lansbury on stage was in 2014 in London, when she played the half-baked medium Madame Arcati in a revival of Noel Coward’s supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit. Although it was rumored that the then-88-year-old Lansbury was having her lines fed to her via earpieces, it did not affect her comic timing one iota. It is no exaggeration to say that Lansbury took a character who has passed into over-familiarity via decades of revivals and made her fresh and hilarious once again. For anyone to achieve this is remarkable, but to do so at an age when most actors would have long since retired is little short of phenomenal. Lansbury’s death at the age of 96 — a few days shy of her 97th birthday — has some uncanny parallels with the recent passing of the Queen.