Kevin Lally on Film

In the pantheon of movie greats, there’s one star that has outlasted all others, lending spectacular support to everyone from Charlie Chaplin and Gene Kelly to Barbra Streisand and Robert De Niro. That star is New York City, the endlessly photogenic locale of countless movies since the silent era. The list of New York-set films…

I said it back in March, and I’ll say it again: The best film of 2023 was made in 1961. It’s baffling that Dino Risi’s masterly Una Vita Difficile was never released in America until this year, but there you go. (More details below.) That’s not to say there weren’t many exceptional new films this year. My…

It’s probably a coincidence, but a recurring theme has emerged at this year’s New York Film Festival: iconic men and their long-suffering female partners. Three films focus on famous, larger-than-life males, but with equal weight given, story-wise, to the women who put up (or don’t) with their titanic, self-aggrandizing egos. For the first half of…