Film Critic and Cultural Writer

Tim Markatos

12 articles 2017–2018

Tim Markatos is a film critic and cultural writer who contributed reviews and essays to The Weekly Standard in 2017 and 2018. His work for the magazine covered a wide range of cinema, including foreign films, art-house releases, and the work of directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson, often exploring themes of love, beauty, and the human condition.

A Few Foreign Films

October 21, 2018 · Web Only, culture, Books & Arts

Tim Markatos’s whirlwind weekend at this year’s New York Film Festival.

Cinematic Saint

August 5, 2018 · Books & Arts, culture, Magazine

Tim Markatos on the challenges of bringing Joan of Arc’s story to the screen.

The Beguiling Beauty of Paul Thomas Anderson's 'Phantom Thread'

January 4, 2018 · culture, Today's Blogs, Magazine

Phantom Thread, the new film from There Will Be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson, leaves such a singular impression that it invites all the familiar descriptions: it’s hauntingly beautiful, achingly lovely, a sumptuous feast for all the senses; it’s a tour de force, the best of the year; I’ve…

What Are Libraries For?

October 9, 2017 · movies, Art, New York

As I was leaving the theater after a screening of Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, the friend I watched it with turned to me and observed, “For a documentary about a library, that movie didn’t have a whole lot to say about books.”

What Are Libraries For?

October 6, 2017 · movies, Art, New York

As I was leaving the theater after a screening of Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, the friend I watched it with turned to me and observed, “For a documentary about a library, that movie didn’t have a whole lot to say about books.”

Robert Pattinson Takes an Odyssean Journey in 'Good Time'

September 15, 2017 · movie review, Robert Pattinson, Today's Blogs

Homer and his successors described Odysseus as polytropos, in reference both to his boundless craftiness and to the literal “many turns” he took on his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. If ever that epithet were due for a deserved comeback, it would be in reference to Robert…

Wind River, Reviewed

August 28, 2017 · Pop Culture, magazine_repost, movie review

Because there are so few of them, any movies about Americans living east of Los Angeles and west of Chicago will nowadays be labeled “important” on first sight. Taylor Sheridan, who grew up on a Texas ranch and moved to Wyoming after 20 years of intermittently rewarding acting work in L.A., has…

Wind River, Reviewed

August 25, 2017 · Pop Culture, movie review, Books and Art

Because there are so few of them, any movies about Americans living east of Los Angeles and west of Chicago will nowadays be labeled “important” on first sight. Taylor Sheridan, who grew up on a Texas ranch and moved to Wyoming after 20 years of intermittently rewarding acting work in L.A., has…

Is Modern Love Endangered?

August 10, 2017 · magazine_repost, Books and Art, Philosophy

Before his untimely passing earlier this year, political philosopher Peter Augustine Lawler offered up some timely reflections on Allan Bloom’s “souls without longing,” the elite students who comprise the bulk of Bloom’s study in his 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. As Lawler…

To Love Another

August 4, 2017 · Books and Art, Philosophy, Magazine

Before his untimely passing earlier this year, political philosopher Peter Augustine Lawler offered up some timely reflections on Allan Bloom’s “souls without longing,” the elite students who comprise the bulk of Bloom’s study in his 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. As Lawler…

The Ghosts in Our Midst

July 23, 2017 · magazine_repost, movie review, Books and Art

Evidently the state of American moviemaking has regressed to the point where all low- to mid-budget movies made at the periphery of the mainstream must be either triumphs or failures, as though all it takes to make an artistically significant film is merely an artistic vision. A Ghost Story,…

Hauntingly Lovely

July 21, 2017 · movie review, Books and Art, ghosts

Evidently the state of American moviemaking has regressed to the point where all low- to mid-budget movies made at the periphery of the mainstream must be either triumphs or failures, as though all it takes to make an artistically significant film is merely an artistic vision. A Ghost Story,…