Manohla Dargis

Manohla Dargis treats movies as art and as a record of contemporary culture, using criticism to connect individual films to larger social and historical currents. She is the chief film critic at the Times, where she reviews work from studio blockbusters to independent and international productions. Her writing combines close attention to craft with an emphasis on power, gender, politics and the industry structures that shape what reaches audiences. She treats reviews as news and as service pieces that point readers to worthwhile films, caution them about weak ones and highlight less familiar work.

Reviews: From ‘The Odyssey’ to ‘Supergirl’

Dargis’s primary output is film reviews, and she covers a wide range of titles from star-driven studio releases to smaller, formally adventurous work. Recent pieces include a review of the climate-change satire “Digger,” starring Tom Cruise, which examines the mismatch between its oil-tycoon protagonist and its strained political ambitions.

She has written about an intense performance from Robert Pattinson in “Primetime,” attending to the way the film channels his unhinged energy, and about “NAZA,” a movie built around intimate interviews that probe war’s human costs. Her beat includes franchise and superhero entries such as “Supergirl” and “Toy Story 5,” where she weighs spectacle against character, theme and originality. She reviews animations like “Bouchra,” about a New Yorker who is also a coyote working on an autobiographical film, and adventure stories like “Underland,” noting how their visual style and narrative choices convey emotional depth. Smaller dramas and comedies such as “Power Ballad” and “The Drama” receive the same scrutiny, with attention to promising ideas that the films do or do not fully develop.

Across these reviews she balances plot description with evaluation of aesthetics, performances and the seriousness with which each film engages its subject.

Essays on Women and Film History

Alongside reviews, Dargis writes essays that focus on women’s place in cinema and on the structures that have kept them out of film history. Featured work includes “For the First Time Ever, I’m Optimistic About Women in the Movie World,” “Rewriting Women Back Into Film History,” “What the Movies Taught Me About Being a Woman,” “What It’s Like to Be a Female Movie Critic in the #MeToo Era” and “Making History.”

These pieces examine how hiring practices, the canon and critical discourse influence which stories are made, who directs them and which films are preserved as central to cinema.

She uses personal experience sparingly, as in discussions of the life of a critic and of navigating the #MeToo era, to illuminate broader patterns of sexism, gatekeeping and change. The essays frame film criticism as part of a larger effort to document and reshape cultural memory, arguing that revisiting the past and amplifying underrepresented work are essential to understanding the movie world today.

Festivals, Awards and the Movie Ecosystem

Festival and awards coverage is a regular strand of Dargis’s work, treated as a way to gauge the health and direction of global filmmaking. At the Toronto International Film Festival she has described recent editions as abundant but mixed, using films by Jesse Eisenberg, Lee Chang-dong and Hirokazu Kore-eda to show how standout titles can offset an uneven program.

Her New York Film Festival coverage highlights “movies with oomph,” focusing on projects that combine strong performances with formal daring and that feature recognizable figures like Pedro Pascal and Nathan Fielder.

From Cannes, she reports on prize winners such as the multilingual drama “Fjord,” situating its exploration of religious conservatism and social liberalism within the atmosphere of a festival that, in one year, felt comparatively muted. She also contributes awards-season pieces like “Oscars 2026: Who Will Win, and Who Should Win?”, using the ballot to draw attention to remarkable films and performances that audiences might overlook.

Across festivals and awards, she shifts between capsule judgments, industry context and analysis of how these events shape the international film ecosystem that she covers throughout the year.

Long-View Criticism and Career Background

Dargis brings a long career in film journalism to her current role, which informs the confidence and historical grounding of her criticism. Her life in journalism begins while she is studying cinema, when she starts writing about movies for The Village Voice. In 1994 she joins L.A. Weekly as a staff film critic and later becomes its film editor, and she then moves to The Los Angeles Times as a co-chief film critic before arriving at the Times in 2004.

Beyond regular columns, she has written a monograph on the film “L.A. Confidential,” and her work appears in several anthologies, underscoring her role in longer-form and historical criticism. Within the Times, colleagues and readers treat her as a film savant and a central voice on Oscar debates and the state of cinema, reflecting the prominence and durability of her voice on the beat.

This background allows her to place contemporary releases, whether mainstream thrillers or small festival titles, within an ongoing story about movies, audiences and power that runs through her reviews, essays and festival reporting.