The Robe

Sep 12, 2007 — Here’s a Criterion discussion that won’t die. It has to do with Berlin Alexanderplatz, and it came up again this week, thanks to a couple of customers writing in. We were standing there in a clump outside our production manager’s...

Oct 18, 2004 — Nixon as Hamlet, Nixon as Lear, Nixon as Blanche DuBois, Nixon as Krapp—clutching every last tape to his breast with the wild fury and despair of a man on the precipice . . . Nixon in his study, poring over...

Jun 23, 2003 — One of the most unusual features of Italian cinema of the late ’50s and ’60s is the way that it affords us multiple perspectives on the same event, namely the economic boom following the postwar recovery. Where the directors of...

Oct 19, 1998 — Horror need not always be a long-fanged gentleman in evening clothes or a dismembered corpse or a doctor who keeps a brain in his gold fish bowl. It may be a warm sunny day, the innocence of girlhood and hints...

Jul 11, 2017 — A forged note brings chaos and corruption to the lives of everyone it touches in Robert Bresson’s devastating final film.

Feb 23, 2012 — Author John Voelker (a.k.a. Robert Traver) met musician Duke Ellington on the set of Anatomy of a Murder; he wrote this piece about the experience for the Detroit News Sunday Magazine in 1967.

Robin Robertson has published seven books of poetry. The Long Take (2018) won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction and was the first poem to be short-listed for the Booker Prize.

Stephen Winer was one of the original writers for Late Night with David Letterman. He has also written for comedians Robert Klein and Dick Van Dyke and the Disney Channel’s The All New Mickey Mouse Club.

May 29, 2026 — We’re revisiting work by Tarkovsky, Pelechian, and Portabella as well as two films with the word Dead in the title.

Jan 15, 2025 — Edward Berger’s improbably entertaining follow-up to All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) scores twelve.