Stuart Klawans was the film critic for The Nation from 1988 through 2020, bringing unmatched wit, moral clarity, and cinematic insight to more than three decades of writing. In My Strange Love: Selected Film Reviews and Essays, 2001–2021, he gathers twenty years of pieces that illuminate the art of moving pictures in all its contradictions—from neorealist poetry to Hollywood excess, from Kubrick’s nuclear sublime to Kiarostami’s quiet grace. Klawans’s prose is erudite yet playful, informed by a lifetime of passionate viewing and an unshakable belief that cinema, even in decline, remains one of humanity’s great experiments in seeing.
Whether he is celebrating Boyhood and Parasite, skewering Zero Dark Thirty and Suicide Squad, or reflecting on war, politics, and the persistence of beauty, Klawans writes as both humanist and historian—alert to the world’s absurdities, sustained by its wonders. My Strange Love is a farewell tour through twenty years of film and thought: a brilliant, generous book from one of America’s most distinctive critical voices, reminding us why movies still matter, and how deeply they can move us.
Stuart Klawans is the author of Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, 1999), Left in the Dark: Film Reviews and Essays 1988-2001, and Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges. He was the film critic for The Nation for more than thirty years, winning the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism in 2007, and has contributed to publications including The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Film Comment, Grand Street, and Parnassus: Poetry in Review. He was named the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2002.
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