From Karkhe to Rhein

May 29, 2019 — In Anna Biller’s vibrantly colored fantasias, there’s not a glimmer of a sequin that hasn’t been envisioned by the artist herself. A writer, director, actor, producer, editor, composer, costume and production designer, and set decorator, she’s a one-woman studio, building...

May 28, 2019 — It has taken me forty years to appreciate the audacity of Agnès Varda in writing and directing One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977). Not only did Varda make her subject the most crucial and vexed issue of the feminist movement, at that...

May 23, 2019 — One family infiltrates another in one of this year’s top critical favorites.

May 20, 2019 — While a few find the family drama heavy-handed, most critics are enthusiastically cheering on Loach’s latest competition entry.

May 13, 2019 — Whether he was adapting Lillian Hellman or Stan Lee, Sargent excelled at locating the human heart beating at the center of the story.

May 10, 2019 — The Heiress, one of the most intense psychological dramas to issue from 1940s Hollywood, unfolds almost entirely under one roof: that of the well-appointed Manhattan town house where tremulous Catherine Sloper (an Oscar-winning Olivia de Havilland) lives with her domineering...

May 7, 2019 — Humming light sabers weren’t the only thing going on during the maligned decade.

May 7, 2019 — “The emotion and conflict between two people in a drawing room can be as exciting as a gun battle, and possibly more exciting,” wrote William Wyler on the release of his film The Heiress in 1949. This tenet is fully borne out...

May 6, 2019 — Greta Garbo, Anita Loos, Ernst Lubitsch, Ben Hecht, and Salka Viertel cross paths in this month’s round.

May 2, 2019 — When I first saw My Brilliant Career, when it was released in New York in 1980, I was ignorant of director “Gill” Armstrong. I assumed she was a man, because at the time I could count the female directors I...