War Story

Apr 12, 2011 — A nightmare from which no one awakes, Claire Denis’ White Material (2009) takes place in a nameless African country teetering on the brink of all-out civil war. It is the veteran French director’s toughest work, unsparing with its characters and...

Feb 22, 2011 — It wasn’t intended. No one could have predicted it. But Sweet Smell of Success turned out to be a terminus where several movie genres and subgenres converged and curdled, producing a uniquely delicious perfume of everlasting cynicism. Inhale deeply. And...

Feb 20, 2011 — Melodrama has a bad reputation because it has been abandoned to schematic and conventional interpretation. —Luchino ViscontiSenso, Luchino Visconti’s extraordinarily lush 1954 movie, was never truly released in America. Even though an American star, Farley Granger, and a European star,...

Feb 2, 2011 — This interview was published in the winter 2010 issue of Brick, a literary journal based in Toronto. It is posted here by permission of the Toronto International Film Festival. The photograph appears courtesy of Colleen Murphy. We met on March...

Feb 1, 2011 — This essay was originally published in the booklet accompanying the 2006 DVD release of The Double Life of Véronique. A new life experience is in the air today, a perception that explodes the form of the linear narrative and renders...

Jan 25, 2011 —  Sapphire: Inner City Given his strikingly eclectic body of work, it’s not surprising that Basil Dearden has never become a household name—he’s too hard to pin down. Moving effortlessly among comedies, melodramas, and thrillers, over a thirty-five-film, nearly thirty-year career,...

Jan 18, 2011 — In his Life Studies poem “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” Robert Lowell wrote of “free-lancing out along the razor’s edge,” a lean, glamorous, tense phrasing that invokes the Samuel Fuller of the early sixties—a director suddenly without...

Jan 18, 2011 — By 1963, when he started filming Shock Corridor on a rented soundstage, Samuel Fuller had come ruefully and puckishly to view himself as a “Lindy,” a diminutive for Charles Lindbergh designating a prostitute who, like the famous aviator, operates solo,...

Jan 11, 2011 — Given the scarcity of information available in the sixties, director Byron Haskin did a remarkable job of representing some of the conditions on our nearest planetary neighbor, nearly a year before the first close-up views of the real Martian surface.

Jan 11, 2011 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Army of Shadows (1969) gives a dramatic account of the extreme dangers faced by the French who resisted the German occupation of 1940–1944. The time of the story is unspecified, but it is probably 1943, late enough...