Did You See This?

Goodbye, Robert Osborne, Kurosawa’s Unfilmed Poe Project, a Chat With Léaud

  • Classic film lovers everywhere were saddened to learn about the death of veteran TCM host Robert Osborne last Sunday. In a heartfelt tribute, Tiffany Vazquez, a daytime host on the channel, writes that “Robert’s wisdom, grace, and eloquence have seen us through hard times. We welcomed him into our living rooms, excitedly waiting to hear his thoughts on every film he introduced.”
  • A TCM staple, George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun, takes the spotlight in the Library of America’s latest Moviegoer column, in which Imogen Sara Smith examines the film alongside the novel that inspired it, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and Josef von Sternberg’s adaptation of the same material.
  • Over at Sight & Sound, Pamela Hutchinson pays tribute to Jeni LeGon, an African American dancer who emerged in 1930s Hollywood and whose unjustly truncated career is recounted in Zadie Smith’s latest novel, Swing Time.
  • For a look at a modern twist on the movie musical, check out Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López’s new video essay on Chantal Akerman's underappreciated Tomorrow We Move,a film in which “the relations between music, dance, and action remain loose, mutually autonomous.”
  • Fandor has premiered a video essay about another great female director: French silent-film trailblazer Alice Guy-Blaché.
  • In her program notes for the New Beverly Cinema, Kim Morgan explores Frank Perry’s take on the Joan Didion novel Play It as It Lays, a portrait of depressive Angelenos struggling to control the narratives of their lives.
  • For the Metrograph Edition, Melissa Anderson gets personal about queerness, solo moviegoing, and the pleasures of watching and rewatching Mulholland Dr.
  • At Uproxx, Keith Phipps writes in defense of “dated” special effects and how they remind us that watching movies is “a matter of constant negotiation.”
  • An unfilmed Akira Kurosawa adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” is reportedly scheduled for production.
  • In an interview featured in the latest issue of Film Comment, French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud reflects on his performance in Albert Serra’s soon-to-be-released The Death of Louis XIV: “It’s funny to see the image of the little boy in The 400 Blows transformed into this agonized old man.”
  • Also at Film Comment, critics Shonni Enelow, Nick Pinkerton, Michael Koresky, and Violet Lucca discuss the experience of observing actors as they change and age over the course of their careers.


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