Author Spotlight

Armond White

Armond White’s film criticism has been published internationally. His collected pop culture criticism appears in the book The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World.

13 Results
George Washington: These American Lives
Presenting  five poor, black and white North Carolina preteens as they awaken to love and death, George Washington (2000) tells a common adolescent story, yet the film is distinguished by the poetic, ruminative style of its twenty-five-year-old …

By Armond White

Essays— Mar 11, 2014
Everlasting Moments: Ways of Seeing
Photography, the basis of cinema, is also the foundation of Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments. The Swedish title of Troell’s feature, his fourteenth, translates as Maria Larsson’s Everlasting Moments, which alludes to the photographs taken by…

By Armond White

Essays— Jun 29, 2010
Revanche: Revival of the Fittest
Revanche begins with a reflection of trees in a lake at twilight. They’re seen upside down—an image of nature reversed—yet the earth is eerily calm. This almost otherworldly illusion arouses a viewer’s awareness of perspective, which is then …

By Armond White

Essays— Feb 11, 2010
Z and the New York Film Critics Circle
Upon its U.S. release in the fall of 1969, Costa-Gavras’s Z made a splash unprecedented for a non-Hollywood film: star Yves Montand talked it up to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, and the film went on to gross $2.2 million during its first year.…

By Armond White

Features— Dec 10, 2009
Z: Sounding the Alarm
Costa-Gavras’s 1969 political assassination thriller Z appeared at the end of a decade of burgeoning cultural change and rampant paranoia. In the United States, this Algerian-French coproduction sparked a sensation, not just relaying the European p…

By Armond White

Essays— Oct 25, 2009
Monterey Pop: People In Motion

A new era in popular music deserves a new era in filmmaking. That’s the basis of the perfect, fortuitous match-up between rock and cinema in D.A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop. When Pennebaker and his 16mm filmmaking team came on board to cover the 1

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By Armond White

Essays— Sep 22, 2009
Truffaut’s Changing Times:The Last Metro
The Last Metro was the most crowd-pleasing film of François Truffaut’s latter career, sweeping an armload of prizes at France’s Oscar equivalent, the César Awards. It was also as personal a film as he had ever made, and that denotes the film’…

By Armond White

Mar 24, 2009
Hobson’s Choice: Custom-Made
David Lean may not be known primarily for his comedies, but the two he made—1945’s Blithe Spirit, based on the Noël Coward play, and then Hobson’s Choice in 1954—were exceptional, combining expertly timed broad humor with his always refined …

By Armond White

Feb 17, 2009
White Dog: Fuller Vs. Racism
No movie is ahead of its time, just ahead of cultural gatekeepers. Sam Fuller knew this better than any other filmmaker after his 1982 White Dog waited almost ten years to get a theatrical release. Despite Fuller’s career-long penchant for giving c…

By Armond White

Nov 28, 2008
Love in the Afternoon: Marriage, Rohmer-Style

Eric Rohmer explores how marriage is a metaphor for social union—its strength and its fragility—in the final episode of the Six Moral Tales.

By Armond White

Essays— Aug 15, 2006
Trouble in Paradise: Lovers, On the Money
Trouble in Paradise is the most fondly memorable—if rarely seen—Hollywood screwball comedy. Its combination of suaveness, hilarity, and sexiness has had a mighty influence. There would be no Bringing Up Baby, no The Lady Eve, no Pat and Mike, wit…

By Armond White

Essays— Jan 7, 2003
Carl Th. Dreyer

Before Lars von Trier, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson there was Carl Th. Dreyer. The first great film artist to pursue the ineffable in cinema, Dreyer gave depth to what early silent filmmakers innately underst

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By Armond White

Aug 21, 2001
The Hidden Fortress

Best known as the major influence on George Lucas’ Star Wars, Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 The Hidden Fortress deserves recognition as a definitive cultural expression of Japan’s master filmmaker. After the international success of Rashomon (1952) and

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By Armond White

May 22, 2001