Peter Matthews

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s characters play an endlessly layered game of dress-up in this tale of sadomasochistic love.

Legend has it that an American money­­man agreed to finance Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves with one stipulation—that the role of the common laborer whose meager capital is stolen be played by Cary Grant. Apocryphal

Nowadays, kids have been trained to regard bludgeoning CGI spectacle as the sine qua non of their movie entertainment. Yet it’s a moot point whether hyperreal visualizations of literally anything stimulate the imagination or stunt it. Amid the curr

When it comes to world cinema, Jonathan Rosenbaum has tartly observed, many American critics are strict isolationists. At least for national film industries judged too exotic or marginal, a rule of “one director per country” seems to apply. By th

Cinema is a photographic trace of life. For that reason, it’s also a perpetual witness to mortality. Georges Poujouly, the child actor who stars, with Brigitte Fossey, in René Clément’s 1952 masterpiece Forbidden Games, died in 2000, at the age

In the classical Hollywood era, it was axiomatic that the public didn’t give a damn about directors. For all the notice taken of the profession by gossip columnists, fan magazine writers, and studio flacks, movies could have grown on trees or sprun