Selected Essays and Reviews

“Women in Trouble” [David Lynch]. Sidecar, 2025.

“Fear and Trembling” [Serge Daney]. The Nation, 2023.

“Alone Together in Taipei” [Tsai Ming-liang]. The New York Review of Books, 2021.

“Don’t Write on Here, Bad Girl” [Yvonne Rainer]. With Erica Getto, The New York Review, 2020.

“The Intimate and the Collective” [Agnès Varda]. The Nation, 2020.

“Wild, Blooming Facts” [Manny Farber & Patricia Patterson]. The New York Review of Books, 2019. 

“Choice Specimens” [Janet Malcolm]. The Threepenny Review, 2019. 

“Always Moving” [Chris Marker]. The New York Review of Books, 2019. 

“Hard Facts” [Introducing excerpts from Manny Farber’s 1979 MoMA talk]. Film Comment, 2019.
Full extant transcript of the lecture printed in French translation in Trafic, 2019. 

“The Anxious Moviegoer” [A.S. Hamrah]. The Nation, 2018. 

“A Hard Road Home” [Chantal Akerman]. The New York Review of Books, 2018. 

“Common Decency” [Peter Nestler]. Film Comment, 2018.
Reprinted in French translation, as “La décence ordinaire,” in Trafic, 2018.

“They’ve Ruined My Song” [Charles Burnett]. Salmagundi, 2018.

“Not Sharing My Mythos of Marriage” [Stan and Jane Brakhage]. NYR Daily, 2017.

“Assassinate the Bird” [Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet]. n+1, 2016.

About

Max Nelson is an online editor at The New York Review of Books. You can reach him at mnelson [at] nybooks [dot] com.

Image: still from Golden Eighties (Chantal Akerman, 1986)