Interview

May 13, 2013 — Delmer Daves’s visually majestic, emotionally charged western finds its drama in the decency of its characters.

May 7, 2013 — Band of Outsiders, now available in a Criterion Blu-ray edition, was Anna Karina’s fourth appearance in a film by her husband at the time, Jean-Luc Godard. The film contains what may be Karina’s sprightliest performance, the perfection of her attunement...

Apr 26, 2013 — Among filmmaker Pierre Etaix’s many eclectic accomplishments is his appearance as one of the thieves in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket. However, you probably won’t be able to spot him: all that’s left of his performance is one of his hands, surreptitiously filching a wallet. In...

Apr 25, 2013 — Repo Man comes on like a bat out of hell. The opening credits are driven by the instrumental version of Iggy Pop’s propulsive "Repo Man Theme,” a song that immediately establishes the film’s punk identity. It’s hard to imagine the...

Apr 23, 2013 — Who is Pierre Etaix and where has he been all your life? This is the story of a filmmaker who was vanished, banished, skipped over. It’s as if one of those invisible cubicles mimes are always getting themselves shut in...

Mar 26, 2013 — Charlie Chaplin manages to make a ruthless murderer likable in his brilliant satire of middle-class morality.

Mar 19, 2013 — A distinctive trait of the films of Terrence Malick is the artful way they employ narration. Sometimes the voice-over is dreamy (Sissy Spacek’s in Badlands), sometimes it’s disarmingly concrete (Linda Manz’s in Days of Heaven), sometimes it comprises audacious, poetic...

Mar 18, 2013 — Using a 1958 murder spree as a narrative springboard, Terrence Malick fashioned a fractured fairy tale about American innocence lost.

Mar 14, 2013 — Ministry of Fear, now available for the first time on DVD and Blu-ray in the U.S., was the eighth film Fritz Lang made in Hollywood after emigrating from Germany in 1936. It was also, as author Joe McElhaney (The Death...

Feb 28, 2013 — Chronicle of a Summer, a sui generis 1961 collaboration between sociologist Edgar Morin and documentary filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch, is considered a pioneering work of cinéma-vérité. That term—coined by Morin himself—gets thrown around a lot, but what does it really mean?...