Author Spotlight

Dennis Lim

Dennis Lim is artistic director of the New York Film Festival and the author of David Lynch: The Man from Another Place (2015) and Tale of Cinema (2022).

21 Results
Werckmeister Harmonies: Dark Side of the Earth

Unfolding in elaborately choreographed long takes, this sublime adaptation of László Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance captures the weight of time and the mood of fascism with a haunting palpability.

By Dennis Lim

Rouge: Love Out of Time

Two eras of Hong Kong history collide in this exquisite ghost story, which solidified director Stanley Kwan’s status as one of cinema’s truest romantics.

By Dennis Lim

Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3

Lucía: In Progress

Humberto Solás’s ambitious epic unites the imperatives of postrevolutionary Cuban cinema, capturing lived experience in a time of rapid change while also rescuing the past from distortion and amnesia.

By Dennis Lim

Death in Venice: Ruinous Infatuation

A master at adapting literary classics for the screen, Luchino Visconti made a bold choice in emphasizing the homoerotic undertones in Thomas Mann’s novella.

By Dennis Lim

Baal: The Nature of the Beast

The careers of three iconic German artists—Bertolt Brecht, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Volker Schlöndorff—converged in this unflinching portrait of destructive genius.

By Dennis Lim

David Lynch: The Art Life: Go with Ideas

One of the most elusive artists in American cinema opens a window onto his private life and creative methods in this revelatory documentary.

By Dennis Lim

Mysterious Object at Noon: Stories That Haunt One Another

In his brilliantly inscrutable debut, Apichatpong Weerasethakul blends documentary authenticity with wild flights of imagination.


By Dennis Lim

The Before Trilogy: Time Regained

In his most seductive experiment with cinematic time, Richard Linklater wrestles with the joys and challenges of long-term intimacy.

By Dennis Lim

Blind Chance: The Conditional Mood

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s political and philosophical rumination, which marked an important turning point in the director's career, imagines a young man's life branching off in three possible directions.

By Dennis Lim

Safe: Nowhere to Hide

Social satire, women’s melodrama, queer metaphor, or horror movie? Todd Haynes’s elusive masterpiece is all of these and none of them.

By Dennis Lim

Love Streams: A Fitful Flow

The emotional culmination of a brilliant career in film, John Cassavetes’s unruly masterpiece is an enigmatic character study and a direct investigation of the nature of love.

By Dennis Lim

Opening Night: The Play’s the Thing
"I“m not acting,” stage star Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) tells her bemused director after a violent episode with her ghostly muse in Opening Night. That’s a loaded claim to be making in a movie that so conclusively smudges the line between ac…

By Dennis Lim

Weekend: The Space Between Two People

Andrew Haigh’s boy-meets-boy story reminds us that the biggest pleasures of falling in love come from the little moments of connection.

By Dennis Lim

Secret Sunshine: A Cinema of Lucidity

Lee Chang-dong’s film is a work of visceral emotions and abstract notions, a study of faith in all its power, strangeness, and cruelty.

By Dennis Lim

Still Walking: A Death in the Family
Death looms over the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda. His first fiction feature, Maborosi (1995), is a quiet study of bereavement, about a young woman struggling to move on after her husband’s inexplicable suicide. In After Life (1998), a supernatural …

By Dennis Lim

Mystery Train: Strangers in the Night
All writing is travel writing, the axiom goes. And for Jim Jarmusch, perhaps more than any other filmmaker working today, all movies are travel movies. It’s not a slight to call him the epitome of the filmmaker as tourist. In a Jarmusch movie, t…

By Dennis Lim

The Insect Woman: Learning to Crawl
Iconoclasts are meant to kill their idols, and so it’s fitting that Shohei Imamura launched into his career as if on a patricidal rampage. Like Nagisa Oshima, the other towering figure of the Japanese New Wave, Imamura (1926–2006) rejected the or…

By Dennis Lim

Brand upon the Brain!: Out of the Past
Every Guy Maddin movie creates the illusion of a secret history. His willfully primitive cut-rate spectacles seem like artifacts, reanimated bits of cultural detritus, but also like hauntings, the return of the cinematic repressed. From the start, Ma…

By Dennis Lim

Mala Noche: Other Love

“They all say that I’m ‘openly gay.’ But they put that in as a little political footnote . . . They don’t say anything about gayness. They just say, ‘He’s openly gay.’ They relate it a little bit to something, but they just get throug

By Dennis Lim

Clean, Shaven: Inside Man
Lodge Kerrigan's movies are so often termed "uncompromising" and "unrelenting" that it's worth pondering what exactly lies behind their steadfast refusal to let up. The salient quality of these spare, intense films is that they deny the viewer the co…

By Dennis Lim

Schizopolis
Whatever else it may be—a riotous Möbius strip of deranged word games and doppelgänger metaphysics, a scalding allegory of professional and personal disappointment, the missing link between Ferdinand de Saussure and Kentucky Fried Movie—Steven …

By Dennis Lim