The New Spirit

Jan 7, 2020 — Understudies everywhere should take heart at the tale of Katharine Hepburn’s long history with the role of Linda Seton, the high-spirited but reclusive heiress she plays in George Cukor’s 1938 Holiday. When the Philip Barry play the film is based...

Sep 17, 2019 — With his last completed film, the sly, suggestive comedy of manners Cluny Brown, Ernst Lubitsch brought to the screen one of the most irrepressible, irresistible Hollywood heroines of the forties. The niece of a plumber in a Britain on the...

Aug 7, 2019 — Studio Visits Brooklyn native Danielle Mastrion draws a great deal of inspiration from the city that she calls home—and also often uses it as her canvas. A socially conscious, classically trained painter who taught herself to work in aerosol, Mastrion...

Jan 19, 2018 — “Tapping into the cultural, social and political anxieties that are tipping our country toward another revolution, Carnegie Hall has rallied some of the biggest institutions in the city for The ‘60s: The Years That Changed America,” writes Eva Kis for...

Jul 18, 2017 — With a weeklong run of our new restoration of Desert Hearts opening at the IFC Center in New York, we spoke with director Donna Deitch about this landmark of LGBT filmmaking.

May 19, 2017 — “Kornél Mundruczó’s Jupiter’s Moon is a messily ambitious and over-extended movie with some great images,” writes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw: “[L]ike his previous picture White God it leaves behind the somewhat torpid realist mannerisms of his even earlier films such...

Oct 25, 2013 — "I“m not acting,” stage star Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) tells her bemused director after a violent episode with her ghostly muse in Opening Night. That’s a loaded claim to be making in a movie that so conclusively smudges the line...

May 9, 2012 — The paradox of the biopic is that the need to give fictional characters the kind of messy, defining behavior that makes them ring true—makes them, in the vocabulary of development, “relatable”—is usually overlooked when an actual life is condensed into...

Oct 28, 2011 — The following is excerpted from a 1972 interview that film scholar Joan Mellen conducted with director Kaneto Shindo. The interview originally appeared in the 1975 book Voices from the Japanese Cinema. I find the social dimension of your films very...

Oct 17, 2011 — Scratch the surface of a contemporary J-horror classic like Ringu (1998) or any of the Ju-on films (2000–03) and you’ll glimpse Yabu no naka no kuroneko (Black Cat from the Grove), released in the U.S. as simply Kuroneko (1968). Shot...