The Cigarette Surfboard

Apr 21, 2021 — First Person The first time I saw Terence Davies’s 1992 film The Long Day Closes, I was upended by a recurring image of the sensitive Liverpool lad at its heart, his arms folded across a worn window ledge as he...

Jun 17, 2013 — The silent legend practices slapstick with clockwork precision in his most iconic, astonishing comedy.

Aug 14, 2019 — There is a scene in Henry King’s State Fair (1933) that ranks among the most poetic moments in all of 1930s American cinema. There is not much to it, just a family driving through the dusk in their rattling pickup...

Jun 21, 2012 — The following interview with actor Ruth Gordon originally appeared in the April 4, 1971, edition of the New York Times. “Have ya gotta angle for the story?” The accent—part New England hayseed, part Dead-End Kid—is unmistakable. It belongs to Ruth...

May 20, 2024 — The cinematographer has reunited with Andrea Arnold for Bird and with Yorgos Lanthimos on Kinds of Kindness.

May 17, 2017 — With her son, Felix Moeller (Forbidden Films), Margarethe von Trotta (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Hannah Arendt) will direct the documentary Ingmar Bergman – Legacy of a Defining Genius, reports Variety’s John Hopewell: “Exploring Bergman’s work with his closest...

Nov 12, 2024 — Filled with expressionistic shadows and pungent details of life in the criminal underworld, this seminal tale of money and violence was among director Howard Hawks’s favorite of his own films.

Jan 26, 2021 — I stumbled onto Will Niava’s debut short film, Zoo, via a still I saw online: a close-up of a young man’s face under blue neon, framed by cigarette smoke. Curious about this striking image, I tracked down the film and...

Oct 26, 2016 — The tropes of light comedy give way to a Kafkaesque nightmare in this incendiary critique of moral rot in Franco-era Spain.

Jan 4, 2024 — Critics and filmmakers remember a subtle giant of the stage and screen.