17 Results
Manic Mahler
British cinema’s mad genius Ken Russell dispenses with history, chronology, genre, and taste in this wild reimagining of the great composer’s life.
Harold Lloyd’s Ingenious Blend of Slapstick and Horror in The Kid Brother
In one of his most ambitious sequences, the silent-comedy legend throws his innocent “glasses” character into a death trap of a setting.
Hollywood’s Top Dog
One of cinema’s most charismatic canines shows off his comedic chops in Leo McCarey’s screwball masterpiece The Awful Truth.
Charlie & Jackie
In 1921’s The Kid, Charlie Chaplin gave his lonely Tramp a five-year-old sidekick in Jackie Coogan, turning the boy into Hollywood’s first major child star.
Choking Chaplin
In the image of the Little Tramp choking, Chaplin found the perfect motif for evoking the horrors of hunger and modern consumption.
Dancing Chaplin
In some of his most elaborately choreographed set pieces, the silent-comedy master confronted the chaos of the world with balletic grace and rhythmic precision.
Being There
David Cairns takes a close look at the carefully calibrated minimalism of Hal Ashby’s masterful satire.
Le grand amour
Beloved for his inventive blend of physical humor and emotional warmth, French director-actor Pierre Etaix passed away last October at the age of eighty-seven. In the second installment of our video series Anatomy of a Gag, filmmaker and critic David…
The Executioner: By the Neck
The tropes of light comedy give way to a Kafkaesque nightmare in this incendiary critique of moral rot in Franco-era Spain.
Day for Night: Are Movies Magic?
François Truffaut’s love letter to the movies is a lightheartedly self-reflexive symphony of camera movement and musical flourish.
Jacques Tati: Things Fall Together
In cinema history, there truly is no gag like a Tati gag.
The Later Career of Richard Lester
Director Richard Lester is best remembered for his delightfully mod films of the sixties, including the Beatles classics A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965) as well as The Knack . . . and How to Get It (1965) and Petulia (1968). In the follo…
The Return of Etaix
Who is Pierre Etaix and where has he been all your life? This is the story of a filmmaker who was vanished, banished, skipped over. It’s as if one of those invisible cubicles mimes are always getting themselves shut in dropped from a blue sky and e…
Thirty-Nine Steps to Happiness
For this Edinburgh-based writer and filmmaker, Hitchcock’s Scottish caper is both fantasy and reality.
Playtime: Things Fall Apart, Beautifully
Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1968) opens in a shiny space: nuns breeze past; a woman in a white uniform clacks through, bearing towels; a baby cries. People wait. The feeling is “hospital.” A second woman in white delivers towels, and we see that h…
Stagecoach: Taking the Stage
Dismiss from your mind, momentarily at least, the John Ford we know, who could define himself with the three words “I make westerns.” Before Stagecoach (1939), Ford’s talking pictures played out in submarines, penitentiaries, and Scottish cas…