Stuart Klawans

Film Critic

The Nation's film critic Stuart Klawans is author of the books Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order (a finalist for the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Awards) and Left in the Dark: Film Reviews and Essays, 1988-2001. His film criticism and reviews for The Nation won the 2007 National Magazine Award. When not on deadline for The Nation, he contributes articles to the New York Times and other publications.

Currently

  • Just a Game?

    June 24, 2009 Subscribe

    Agnès Varda's The Beaches of Agnès, Havana Marking's Afghan Star

  • Live Long and Prosper

    May 27, 2009

    J.J. Abrams's Star Trek, Ron Howard's Angels & Demons, Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours

  • Pure Cinema

    April 29, 2009

    Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys, Erick Zonca's Julia, Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control.

  • Lonely Blue Boys

    April 2, 2009 Subscribe

    Zack Snyder's Watchmen, Tony Gilroy's Duplicity, Greg Mottola's Adventureland.

  • The Mutual Human Concern

    March 4, 2009 Subscribe

    Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata, Steve McQueen's Hunger, Andrzej Wajda's Katyn.

  • Waste Management

    February 4, 2009

    Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah, plus The Class and Coraline.

  • Schindler's List

    January 10, 2009

    From a book by Thomas Keneally, who was convinced by the shopkeeper to look at some old documents he kept in the back of his store. The man was one of the 12,000 people saved by Oskar Schindler.

  • Unforgiven

    January 9, 2009

    Clint Eastwood won his first Academy Award for this Dirty-Harry-meets-the-western classic.

  • Forrest Gump

    January 8, 2009

    In which an addled man stumbles through recent American history, kind of like George W. Bush.

  • Guilt and Absolution

    January 7, 2009 Subscribe

    Reviewing Silent Light and more.

  • Saving Private Ryan

    January 3, 2009

    It was said that the opening scenes of the D-Day invasion were so realistic that veterans hospitals across the country became filled with vets suffering from flashbacks after seeing the film.

  • Hoop Dreams

    January 3, 2009

    ...are made to be broken, as Arthur Agee and William Gates learned the hard way over the five years their lives on and off the court were filmed.

  • Roger and Me

    January 1, 2009

    The real question is who comes off worse: the callous GM executive, the bunny-cidal woman or Bob Eubanks, the anti-Semitic, joke-telling gameshow host.

2008

  • GoodFellas

    December 8, 2008

    Unlike The Godfather, in Martin Scorsese's depiction of New York mafioso, no one pretends to be a man of honor. That's one of the reasons it's so great.

  • Do the Right Thing

    December 8, 2008

    New York City's second most-famous Mookie delivers pizza and fights the power in Spike Lee's breakthrough film. Some critics predicted its provocative portrayal of race tensions would cause riots. Instead, the film started a dialogue.

  • Epic Moments

    December 3, 2008 Subscribe

    Gus Van Sant's Milk, Baz Luhrmann's Australia, Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy.

  • The Dread of Failure

    November 6, 2008

    Reviews: Arnaud Desplechin's enchanted A Christmas Tale and Charlie Kaufman's brilliant Synedoche, New York.

  • Panoramas

    October 8, 2008 Subscribe

    24 City and Ashes of Time Redux, two stars of the New York Film Festival; plus Happy-Go-Lucky and Ballast reviewed.

  • Burned Out

    September 17, 2008

    The Coen brothers' dark comedy and Godfrey Cheshire's story of plantation life.

  • Closely Watched Water

    August 13, 2008 Subscribe

    Hurricane Katrina seen from an eye in the storm.

  • The Disasterplex

    July 31, 2008

    Superstars and superheroes fight and flounder through Hollywood's season of wanton destruction.

  • Playing Politics for Laughs

    June 26, 2008

    Reviewing a homegrown war documentary, a portrait of Native American life and a pair of spy comedies.

  • Twilights

    May 29, 2008 Subscribe

    Who are films like Speed Racer, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Edge of Heaven really aimed at?

  • Photo Ops

    May 1, 2008 Subscribe

    Errol Morris's new documentary Standard Operating Procedure lacks critical distance but produces masterful evocations of Abu Ghraib.

  • Un Ballon Est un Ballon

    April 9, 2008

    In Flight of the Red Balloon, filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien takes on an unmistakably Parisian story with unbridled creative abandon.

  • Our Troubled Youth

    March 6, 2008 Subscribe

    Exploring the unexpected: Chop Shop, Paranoid Park, Vantage Point.

  • Cool Devastation

    February 7, 2008

    American movie-goers finally get to see Cristian Mungiu's stunning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

  • Letters

    February 6, 2008 Subscribe

  • A Hard Man

    January 10, 2008 Subscribe

    Paul Thomas Anderson's masterful There Will Be Blood pits an oil baron against a preacher in an epic contest of wills.

2007

  • Grave Thoughts

    September 6, 2007

    Heddy Honigmann's documentary Forever visits the dead in Paris, but nobody grieves; James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma pits an evil Russell Crowe against a driven Christian Bale.

  • Bywater Blues

    August 23, 2007

    Reviews of Kamp Katrina, The Monastery and Exiled.

  • Spy Games

    August 9, 2007

    Reviews of The Bourne Ultimatum and The Simpsons Movie.

  • Stuff Happens

    July 26, 2007 Subscribe

    Reviews of No End in Sight, The Devil Came on Horseback, The Sugar Curtain and Sunshine.

  • Boys (and Girls) of Summer

    July 12, 2007

    Live Free or Die Hard is boot camp for slackers. Knocked Up takes measure of the inadequate man.

  • Anatomy of a Murder

    June 21, 2007

    Reviews of A Mighty Heart, Sicko, Czech Dream and Unborn in the USA.

  • Good News From Romania?

    June 7, 2007

    12:08 East of Bucharest is a hilariously bleak film set on the sixteenth anniversary of Romania's revolution.

  • Dreamscape

    May 24, 2007

    Reviews of the animated psychoanalytic sci-fi thriller Paprika, 9 Star Hotel and Poison Friends.

  • Spider-Man 3: Third Time's (Not) the Charm

    May 10, 2007

    Sam Raimi has loaded so many big ideas into Spider-Man 3, they drag this morality-soaked bag of kittens right down to the river's bottom.

  • Desire and Its Discontents

    April 19, 2007 Subscribe

    Reviews of Syndromes and a Century, Private Fears in Public Places, Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis and Stephanie Daley.

  • Undercover of the Night

    April 5, 2007 Subscribe

    Reviews of the films Black Book and Zodiac.

  • That's the Way of the World

    March 29, 2007

    Reviews of U-Carmen, Offside and Killer of Sheep, arguably one of the best films of 2007.

  • The Things They Carried

    March 12, 2007

    Reviews of The Host, The Wind That Shakes the Barley and The Namesake.

  • Winter Light

    February 26, 2007 Subscribe

    Stuart Klawans reviews Into Great Silence, Sátántangó and the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective of Abbas Kiarostami's films.

  • The Spy Who Loved Me

    February 9, 2007

    Reviews of The Lives of Others and Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams.

  • Factory Girl

    January 30, 2007 Subscribe

    China Blue is a surprisingly fair-minded documentary about teenagers working in a jeans factory in China.

  • The General in His Labyrinth

    January 4, 2007

    Reviews of Guillermo del Toro's dizzying Pan's Labyrinth and part two of Clint Eastwood's World War II opus, Letters From Iwo Jima.

2006

  • Within the Context of No Context

    December 14, 2006

    Reviews of Blood Diamond, Inland Empire, The Good German and The History Boys.

  • Unhappy Meal

    November 30, 2006

    Stuart Klawans reviews Fast Food Nation, a film that aspires to activism as it undermines its own anticorporate message.

  • Coming to America!

    November 16, 2006

    Reviews of films from the vulgar to the magisterial: Borat, Flags of Our Fathers, For Your Consideration, Our Daily Bread and Fur.

  • The Tracks of My Tears

    November 6, 2006

    Penelope Cruz shines in Pedro Almodóvar's Volver; James Longley's Iraq in Fragments is a repository of small truths.

  • The Queen Is Dead

    October 20, 2006

    Reviews from the New York Film Festival, including Marie Antoinette, Climate, 49 Up and more.

  • Down These Mean Streets

    October 5, 2006

    Martin Scorsese is one of those great artists who not only expresses emotion through film but also invents it. With The Departed, he proves why he's one of the best.

  • Dead Flowers

    September 20, 2006

    Reviews of Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia and Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy.

  • Big in Japan

    September 7, 2006

    Reviews of Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, Hollywoodland and This Film Is Not Yet Rated.

  • Virtual Catastrophe

    August 24, 2006

    World Trade Center's hero is a tough ex-Marine who later re-enlists to fight in Iraq. But his (and Oliver Stone's) redemption narrative is soured by bad faith.

  • The Magic Bus

    August 10, 2006

    Reviews of Little Miss Sunshine, Quinceañera, My Country, My Country, The Pusher Trilogy and The Bridesmaid.

  • With Feathers

    July 27, 2006 Subscribe

    In Lunacy, order and liberty wriggle with equal parts Poe and Sade. In Scoop, recycled sleuthing gags masquerade as timely satire.

  • Sea Sick

    July 13, 2006

    Reviews of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Edmond, The Motel, Gabrielle, Time to Leave and The Blood of My Brother.

  • Dazed and Confused

    June 28, 2006

    A hallucinatory mix of animation and live action creates the Orwellian world of A Scanner Darkly; substance triumphs over style in Excellent Cadavers, a Mafia-busting documentary.

  • News of a Kidnapping

    June 14, 2006

    Reviews of The Road to Guantanamo and Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul.

  • Local Hero

    June 1, 2006

    Reviews of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, A Prairie Home Companion and The Da Vinci Code.

  • Wind From the Mideast

    May 18, 2006

    "The Road to Damascus" explores the strange, the beautiful and the uncanny in Syrian cinema.

  • Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

    May 4, 2006

    Reviews of four stellar films: Three Times, Art School Confidential, Lady Vengeance and Army of Shadows.

  • Sloppy Seconds

    May 4, 2006

    The plagiarism flap over Opal Mehta is essentially a story about clichés and stereotypes passing from one subliterary commercial product to another.

  • Night on Earth

    April 20, 2006

    Reviews of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, The Notorious Bettie Page and Sir! No Sir!

  • Treasure Island

    April 6, 2006

    Reviews of Iron Island, Inside Man and Sisters in Law.

  • The Wild Child

    March 23, 2006

    Reviews of L'Enfant, V for Vendetta, Shakespeare Behind Bars, Toro Negro, The Devil's Miner and Mardi Gras: Made in China.

  • Consuming Desires

    March 9, 2006

    Thank You for Smoking praises the professional hucksters of the cigarette companies, and Duck Season is a road movie in which the scenery doesn't change.

  • The Candidate

    February 23, 2006

    James Carville peddles democracy in Bolivia in Our Brand Is Crisis, and anti-Nazi passions play out in Sophie Scholl: The Last Days.

  • A Touch of Evil

    February 9, 2006

    Reviews of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Battle in Heaven, Blossoms of Fire and The Fallen Idol.

  • The Unquiet American

    January 25, 2006

    Reviews of Why We Fight, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World and Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.

  • Cruel and Unusual Punishment

    January 11, 2006

    Michael Haneke's Caché is a stylish thriller that scrapes away at the surface of polite European affluence to lay bare the moral rot beneath.

2005

  • A History of Violence

    December 20, 2005

    Munich is a first-rate spy thriller featuring an assassin who reveals his soul. Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain gives two extraordinary actors time and space to develop a rare emotional interplay. Match Point puzzles with a dirty-minded energy. And Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong is true to the Depression-era original.

  • Imitation of Art

    December 8, 2005

    The Chronicles of Narnia is the perfect combination of Christian allegory and The Lord of the Rings, a well-crafted commodity and nothing more. The Ice Harvest, an anti-Christmas film noir, has an unexpected depth of feeling. Memoirs of a Geisha is all prestige and promotions.

  • The Best Intentions

    November 22, 2005

    Syriana disappoints; The Boys of Baraka documents the lives of inner-city kids transported to the wild beauty of Africa; and Punishment Park zeroes in on injustice in America.

  • About a Girl

    November 2, 2005

    Breakfast for Pluto is the upbeat and whimsical fable of a girl in a boy's body. Watching Claire Danes in Shopgirl will make you forget for a while that other actresses exist.

  • The Young and the Damned

    October 19, 2005

    Paradise Now explores the bond among suicide bombers; The Squid and the Whale brings two monstrously large characters to human scale and The President's Last Bang is nastily efficient.

  • Lessons of Darkness

    October 6, 2005

    A History of Violence examines one man's attempt to protect his family from the murderers drifting into his small Indiana town. Good Night, and Good Luck presents a portrait of Senator Joseph McCarthy to a generation that knows him only as the front end of an "ism."

  • Anywhere But Here

    September 22, 2005

    Tim Burton enlivens the dark and gloomy life of corpses and aristocrats in Corpse Bride; Occupation: Dreamland offers an unsentimental view of Iraqi soldiers.

  • A Continent for the Taking

    September 8, 2005 Subscribe

    What to make of The Constant Gardener, a movie focused on Europeans set in Africa, the return of Terry Gilliam and the New York City-set Keane?

  • Neighbors

    August 25, 2005 Subscribe

    A trio of film reviews: Wall, Tony Takitani and Red Eye.

  • Eat the Document

    August 11, 2005

    Stuart Klawans reviews four documentary films.

  • Time Out of Mind

    July 28, 2005 Subscribe

  • Alien Nation

    July 14, 2005 Subscribe

    Reviews of War of the Worlds, Dark Water and Land of the Dead

  • Shoot the Piano Player

    June 29, 2005

    Reviews of The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Me and You and Everyone We Know and other new films.

  • A Fistful of Dollars

    June 15, 2005 Subscribe

  • Adult Content

    June 2, 2005 Subscribe

    Reviews of Madagascar, Howl's Moving Castle and several other new films.

  • Love on the Run

    May 12, 2005 Subscribe

  • Compromising Positions

    April 28, 2005 Subscribe

  • The Counterfeiter

    April 14, 2005 Subscribe

  • Gangs of Shanghai

    March 31, 2005 Subscribe

  • Tipsy Turvy

    March 16, 2005 Subscribe

  • Rock the Casbah

    March 3, 2005 Subscribe

  • Constantine

    February 17, 2005 Subscribe

  • My Life as a Man

    February 3, 2005 Subscribe

  • Blood Simple

    January 20, 2005 Subscribe

  • Before Night Falls

    January 6, 2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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