Best of the Best

Jun 17, 2013 — The silent legend practices slapstick with clockwork precision in his most iconic, astonishing comedy.

Jun 26, 2012 — Hiroshi Inagaki’s action epic is as responsible for creating Toshiro Mifune’s legendary cinematic persona as the films of Kurosawa.

Jun 25, 2012 — For this Edinburgh-based writer and filmmaker, Hitchcock’s Scottish caper is both fantasy and reality.

Feb 28, 2011 — In 1969, director Alexander Macken­drick retired from the film industry and became founding dean of the film school at the newly established California Institute of the Arts. Passionately interested in the pedagogy of cinema (“Film writing and directing cannot be...

Nov 16, 2010 — To make a silent film in 1931, four years after The Jazz Singer, was to buck the trend in a film industry rapidly divesting itself of silence. To make another in 1936, nearly a decade after the advent of sound,...

Jul 26, 2010 — The Story of a Cheat: Breaking the Rules While most filmmakers arrive at their profession already possessed of a vigorous love of cinema, Sacha Guitry saw the form, at least at first, as a necessary evil. Paris’s most popular and prolific...

Feb 12, 2009 — This week, French actor Jean Martin died at the age of eighty-six. Thogh he appeared in more than eighty films (including My Name Is Nobody and The Day of the Jackal), Martin is probably best remembered for his role as...

Oct 6, 2007 — In Gus Van Sant’s first feature, gayness—blind, unembarrassed homosexual lust—is the narrative’s driving force.

May 9, 2005 — This seminal documentary conveys the particular seductiveness and resonance of the dream of going pro for two talented Chicago teenagers.

Nov 19, 2001 — Alfred Hitchcock’s first film in Hollywood is his earliest definitive statement on male domination and female subjugation.