The Way of Drama

Apr 14, 2008 — Allen Baron’s stark, moody Blast of Silence (1961) is a movie of many strange distinctions. It’s among the last of the true film noirs, those fatalistic black-and-white urban crime dramas that darkened the American screen so gloriously in the years...

Nov 21, 2005 — Why would ambitious filmmakers simply film an opera? Many admirers of the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have assumed that their decision to make The Tales of Hoffmann, in 1950, was in some way an admission by the...

Sep 11, 2024 — Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays a deeply frustrated woman in Leigh’s first film set in contemporary Britain since Another Year (2010).

Oct 24, 2023 — A beautiful, intense woman stands in a large, dusky room, lit only by an oil lamp, her eyes wide in concern and something not far from panic, her eyebrows tremulously registering every thought and fear that passes through her mind,...

Dec 14, 2021 — In 1968, soon after he graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India, Mani Kaul made an arresting short titled Forms and Designs. It observes artisans at work across the country, some swimming alone against the tide of mass...

Jun 10, 2020 — Years ago I took a seminar on movie stars led by the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, a glittering episode that closed out a rather colorless stint in graduate school. The syllabus was replete with inspired double bills⁠—Deleuze on Leibniz + Lana...

Dec 14, 2018 — “It’s sad to say, but women do not have much importance in westerns,” observed Anthony Mann, a master of the genre, in a 1957 Cahiers du cinéma interview. Made that same year, Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns begins with a whopper...

Feb 7, 2018 — In celebration of Ingmar Bergman’s centennial, New York City’s Film Forum launches a five-week retrospective that encompasses a whopping forty-seven films.

Sep 30, 2017 — Before We Vanish, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard program at Cannes, screens tonight (Saturday) and tomorrow (October 1) as part of the Main Slate of this year’s New York Film Festival.“This giddily enjoyable stew of absurdist gore from...

Sep 14, 2017 — New York. Tomorrow through Wednesday, the Metrograph presents new 35 mm prints of ten features and five shorts as the UCLA Festival of Preservation flies in from the left coast. In the Village Voice, Melissa Anderson previews Howard Alk’s “scalding...