The Human Being

Feb 12, 2007 — Bicycle Thieves is truly one of my favorite films. I could watch it over and over again, and in truth, I have.

Apr 8, 2021 — If I wanted to do justice to my memory of Bertrand Tavernier, I would have to tell half my life. That’s why I prefer to start with his films—and with the one I perhaps like the best. In Coup de...

May 26, 2020 — Richard Ford’s 1990 novel Wildlife begins with this arresting sentence: “In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love...

Apr 29, 2014 — One legendary American director pays tribute to another.

Sep 23, 2002 — In 1940 and 1941, David O. Selznick won back-to-back Academy Awards for Best Picture. In 1942, unsurprisingly, he was depressed. His wife, Irene, persuaded him to seek help, and, less than one year later, hale and hardy, he was eager...

Jul 4, 1994 — Mike Leigh was born in the north of England in 1943. He was trained in the theater at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and in film at the London Film School. When he arrived in London in the early...

Jul 15, 2025 — Much of the program upends assumptions about the postwar years as a period of relative calm and conformity.

Oct 11, 2023 — The shock of Davies’s passing is compounded by the sinking realization that cinema has lost one of its most singular artists.

Nov 30, 2022 — Three Keaton shorts will open A Day of Silents at the Castro before a series runs through December 21 in Berkeley.

Mar 22, 2022 — In Robert Aldrich’s epic disaster film, James Stewart leads a pack of temperamentally different men as they struggle to survive in the face of the unknown—a template that would go on to influence Hollywood blockbusters for decades to come.