Nick Pinkerton

While "cinematic" is wantonly thrown around when discussing other media, no word is so often misapplied in talking about movies as "painterly." Usually it's a vague descriptor indicating wowing cinematography — but LACMA's six-film "Cinema After Caravaggio" series attempts a more delicate project, trying to pinpoint a single painter's influence......

Salesmen are typically depicted in screen drama as the quintessential American phonies. The exceptions — in Barry Levinson's Avalon or Whit Stillman's Barcelona — are buried under a mountain of films proving the rule. That one set of phonies is being dramatically indicted by actors is an irony that we......