Pranchiyettan & The Saint

Nov 5, 2013 — The author’s colorful interactions with the famously crusty filmmaker.

Sep 9, 2013 — As outré as it is, the most subversive thing about this classic farce is its take on what’s normal.

Feb 24, 2010 — Major Barbara: Stage to Screen It was one of the most improbable linkups in the history of either theater or cinema—as unlikely as Andrew Undershaft’s turning over his munitions empire to Adolphus Cusins, his not-quite-yet son-in-law (and newly declared “foundling”),...

Dec 1, 2009 — In the eight films he’s made since 1991, Arnaud Desplechin has been developing a visionary world, a personal style that goes against the grain of standard cinematic practice today. He’s a master of ensemble mise-en-scène and a brilliant director of...

Aug 22, 2005 — This delicate, fascinating film is self-consciously, almost militantly, naive, and it remains something of an anomaly in Roberto Rossellini’s body of work.

Jun 3, 2001 — Jacques Tati’s singular satire is a series of giddy encounters between people and things in which the wonders of “modern life” relinquish their functionality in favor of an unaccountably rapturous beauty.

Jan 11, 1999 — This epic reimagining of medieval Russia was the most historically audacious production made in the twenty-odd years after Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.

Jul 20, 2021 — Dismissed as gossip-column fodder in its time, Jacques Deray’s cooly enigmatic villa thriller is an exploration of masculine vanity and feminine disillusion.

Jan 17, 2012 — “I felt they showed more of me than they’d said they were going to,” Catherine Deneuve remarked to Pascal Bonitzer in 2004, about the making of Luis Buñuel’s 1967 Belle de jour. “There were moments when I felt totally used....

Aug 30, 2011 — “It is much less a film than it is myself,” Jean Cocteau wrote to a friend at the time he was making Orpheus (1950), “a kind of projection of the things that are important to me.” As with many of...