The Way of the Househusband: The Cinema

Sep 22, 2009 — A new era in popular music deserves a new era in filmmaking—that’s the basis of the perfect, fortuitous match-up between rock and cinema in D.A. Pennebaker’s concert film.

May 11, 2009 — Novelists learn not to expect too much when their books are made into movies. Obviously, great fiction has been turned into great cinema, but the dents and scrapes that so many classics have sustained on the rocky road from the...

Aug 18, 2008 — One of the most awarded films in Japanese history, Keisuke Kinoshita’s nostalgia piece unfolds a celebration of family values and scenic beauty.

Jan 21, 2008 — In September 1997, I saw Agnès Varda introduce a brand-new 35 mm print of her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (made in 1954), to an admiring audience at Yale University. More astonishing than the luminous black-and-white images was Varda’s...

Dec 4, 2006 — William Greaves’s masterpiece uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary.

May 22, 2006 — Barbara Kopple’s detailed analysis of a Kentucky mine workers’ strike is a virtual hub of urgent themes, formal tendencies, political debates, and material practices that define post-sixties documentary in America.

Jan 23, 2006 — Ingmar Bergman was enjoying one of the happiest spells of his life while making The Virgin Spring (1960). On a personal level, he was felicitously ensconced in his fourth marriage, to the concert pianist Käbi Laretei. And, professionally, he was...

Jun 27, 2005 — Kô Nakahira’s taboo-busting melodrama heralded a reinvention of Japanese cinema.

Jan 17, 2005 — Along with Touchez pas au grisbi and Le Trou, Casque d’or is now widely recognized as the summit of Jacques Becker’s achievement as a filmmaker.

Jan 17, 2005 — Jacques Becker’s crime film contains plenty of the requisite genre elements—double-crossings, violence, kidnappings, and gun battles—but it’s also a pensive meditation on age, friendship, and lost opportunities.