Actors & Personalities · French Cinema
Delphine Seyrig: The Eternal Return
“Seyrig is capable of stopping an entire film with one decisive physical gesture, one smile, one glare, one sound from her smoky, murmuring voice.”
Category: Artists
Actors & Personalities · Dance · Dancers · Hollywood · Music & Musicals
Fred Astaire: Footsteps on the Sands of Time
He is transfixing just walking across the screen in his first movie, Dancing Lady (1933), where he partners Joan Crawford and looks as if he could fly if he wanted[…]
Actors & Personalities · Interviews
“The Best Jewish Cowboy”: An Interview with James Caan
“Hard times will make a monkey eatred peppers.”
Happy Happy Birthday Baby! Steve McQueen (b. 3/24/30): Fifty Years of the King of Cool
“Steve understood real people, particularly misfits, like nobody else.It was just the Hollywood brass he loathed.”
Drama · Women in Film · Writers & Critics
Novel into Film: Adapting Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter
We come to find out as viewers, whether we believe in Leda’s self-governing comportment at the beginning or not, that this task of motherhood is never-ending; each work demonstrates to[…]
Absurdism · Comedy · Directors
Caricature and Empathy in the Work of the Coen Brothers
Ethan and Joel Coen have shared writing, directing, and producing credits on their collaborations until their recent hiatus from working together. Here they are on location for their 2004 comedy[…]
Comedy · Directors · Eastern European · Romance · Writers & Critics
How Did Hungarians Do It? The Hungarian World of Ernst Lubitsch
Lubitsch biographers and critics have accepted the lore that the Hungarian plays he used for his films were inferior. That widely held perception has come about because Lubitsch’s admirers want[…]
Drama · War · Writers & Critics
Designated Mourner: On Christian Petzold’s Transit
The refugees’ babel is a constant background presence in Seghers’s novel, a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the various ship arrivals and departures, and spreading news of any developments[…]
Actors & Personalities · Pre-Code · Sex & Relationships · Women in Film
Mae West: Pleasure Woman
West is a born outlaw, a queen of the underworld who knows that two and two are four but five will get you 10 if you know how to work[…]
Directors · Drama · Outsiders · War · Writers & Critics
“Write Some Good Ones”: How Billy Wilder’s Most Autobiographical Film Was Directed by Somebody Else
Rumanian refugee Georges Iscovescu (Charles Boyer) conning a guileless California schoolteacher, Emmy Brown (Olivia de Havilland, in an Oscar-nominated role), into marrying him so he can enter the United States[…]
Counterculture · Directors · Drama · Interviews · Restorations
My My, Hey Hey, Out of the Blue Is Here to Stay: John Alan Simon and Elizabeth Karr Talk about the Restoration of Dennis Hopper’s Masterpiece
Dennis wasn’t originally hired to direct Out of the Blue, rather he was hired to act in it. After about a week of shooting, the production manager, Paul Lewis, who[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Drama · Silents · Women in Film
An Innocent Lulu: How Pabst Rewrote Wedekind in Pandora’s Box
If she is seen simply as a free spirit, a woman who lives for sexual pleasure, and as exemplary on that account, a model liberated woman (as Louise Brooks herself[…]
Directors · Historical & Epic · Horror · Politics
Five Screenplays by Larry Cohen: Bone, J. Edgar Hoover x2, It’s Alive III, Return to Salem’s Lot
I have been a fan of writer/director Larry Cohen ever since viewing his 1970s classics The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977) and It Lives Again (1978). Cohen was[…]
Directors · Drama · Production History
Mysteries of The Deep: The Making and Unmaking of Orson Welles’s Dead Reckoning
For all his flaws, Welles was not a man with a fear of completion, but rather one who would hold on to finishing his work to the absolute breaking point.[…]
Tall Cool One: The Artful Life of Anthony James
As some of those character names echo, James portrayed a lot of villainy and savage desperation over the course of his career, inaugurated by his performance as burning racist Ralph[…]
Actors & Personalities · Asian · Directors · Theory
Inhabiting the Frame: Building as Body in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Stray Dogs
When Lee’s daughter asks her new caretaker why the apartment is such a mess, she answers, “A house is like a person. It gets sick, grows old. The cracks in[…]
Directors · Essays · Romance · Writers & Critics
Vertigo and Lolita: The Supreme Love Fictions of the 20th Century?
But these reflections bring Vertigo down to “depressing” reality. The view that reality is a downer redeemable only by “exalted seeing” is the basis for James Harvey’s disparagement of 1950s[…]
Actors & Personalities · Colonialism · Drama · Essays · Historical & Epic · Philosophy · Religion & Spirituality · Writers & Critics
A Passage to India with James Fox: Understanding a Curious Country through an English Film
Near the close of our Skype meeting, my conversation with James Fox turned inside out. He enquired if he could ask me a question. He then tried to assemble the[…]
French Cinema · Literature and Film · Philosophy · Writers & Critics
The Invention of Marienbad: Resnais, Robbe-Grillet, Morel, and Adolfo Bioy Casares on the Left Bank
Tout le film est en effet l’histoire d’une persuasion. (The whole film is the story of a persuasion.) – Alain Robbe-Grillet1 En fait, je pense qu’on a tout à fait[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama
The Erotic Persona of Jimmy Stewart: From Visionary to Voyeur
You would never guess either from looking at him or from the “aw shucks” way in which he’s remembered that Stewart is responsible for some of the most erotic romantic[…]
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