Life of Pi

Apr 20, 2015 — "Afilm about India without elephants and tiger hunts”—this was how Jean Renoir described his objective in making The River. Guided by Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel, he rejected the India of exotic action and spectacle to make a meditative, almost mystical...

Apr 14, 2015 — Preston Sturges revealed a lot about himself and the movie business in this hilarious and socially committed comedy.

Oct 21, 2014 — Federico Fellini’s frantic tragicomedy is such a classic it risks being underestimated.

Oct 14, 2014 — What happens offscreen is as important as what’s on- in John Ford’s subtle, elegiac take on the Wyatt Earp–Doc Holliday story.

Sep 16, 2014 — The following interview is from filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s 1997 book Lynch on Lynch. The interviews in the book were conducted by Rodley between January 1993 and December 1996. Eraserhead took five years to complete. You must have been...

Jul 15, 2014 — Ihave an unusually easy way of remembering when I first became fascinated by Robert Bresson’s films. Pickpocket (1959) was the first one I saw, at the old Orson Welles theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in my late teens; it was also...

Jun 24, 2014 — One of the most important contributions Peter Davis’s Hearts and Minds makes to our national dialogue on the Vietnam War is its portrayal of ordinary Vietnamese. For years, the Vietnamese had been conspicuous by their absence in American film and...

Jun 5, 2014 — The following is excerpted from an interview with Red River editor Christian Nyby that critic Ric Gentry conducted in 1991.

Apr 18, 2014 — The following interview, conducted by Stig Björkman, originally appeared in Björkman’s 1999 book Trier on von Trier.

Feb 4, 2014 — When François Truffaut was a twenty-three-year-old film critic, in 1955, he read an autobiographical first novel by a seventy-four-year-old writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. “The book overwhelmed me,” he later recalled, “and I wrote: If I ever succeed in making films, I...