The New Yorker at 100

The New Yorker at 100, 2025, 3 ¼ stars

Headline maker

How The New Yorker changed our world

Exclusive to MeierMovies, October 2, 2026

There was a time, in the mid-1940s, when most Americans viewed the atomic bomb as just another weapon of war. There was a time, in the early 1960s, when most Americans viewed pesticides as harmless. And there was a time, prior to the mid-1960s, when the non-fiction crime novel was unknown to the American public.

The New Yorker changed all that. And along the way, over the course of a century of weekly publications, the venerable magazine brought us fiction, social commentary, poetry and other eclectic content, all embellished by those charming and often erudite cartoons that we enjoyed while being ashamed to admit we sometimes didn’t understand.

We are reminded of all this in effulgent fashion by The New Yorker at 100, a documentary timed to the centenary of the publication. After a brief festival run last year, the Netflix-produced film started streaming on that aforementioned service in December, but I didn’t catch it until last month when it was arguably the best (somewhat) new movie at Orlando’s Global Peace Film Festival.

Attending that festival screening was director Marshall Curry. In fact, the entire fest practically belonged to Curry, as two more of his films screened there: A Night at the Garden (an Oscar-nominated short doc from 2017) and his first film, Street Fight (a 2005 Oscar-nominated feature doc about the Newark mayoral candidacy of a then-unknown Cory Booker).

Ironically, it was a narrative short, The Neighbors’ Window, from 2019, that won the acclaimed documentarian his sole Oscar. But his heart seems to belong to docs, as he has shown a remarkable ability to slip effortlessly from topic to topic over his 20-year nonfiction career.

The New Yorker at 100 isn’t as compelling as Street Fight, and, at just over 90 minutes, it leaves a tremendous amount of journalistic history on the cutting-room floor. But how could it be otherwise? A complete look at the magazine’s life would be the stuff not of Netflix but of Tolstoy – or, in pop-culture terms, a TV or web series. But for a CliffsNotes of The New Yorker, it is well organized, slick and even a little profound. It’s also well timed, coming during the increasingly anti-press administration of Orange Julius Caesar. (I temporarily break with journalistic protocol regarding the naming of the president of the United States only to possibly inspire The New Yorker’s cartoonists.)

Curry accomplishes his neatest trick when he occasionally steers his historical, talking-heads doc toward a different format: a tense countdown to the 100th-anniversary issue. We see Editor David Remnick and his staff debating the format of the special issue, right down to how they will portray their dandy of a mascot, Eustace Tilley. This intimate insight into the inner workings of the publication is worth – as the saying goes about a picture – a thousand words. But this is The New Yorker, so make that 10,000 words. And don’t forget the diaeresis and the Oxford comma.

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Go here for more information about the 2026 Global Peace Film Festival. And see Wikipedia and IMDB for more information on this film.