His House

Jun 10, 2011 — Bringing Junichiro Tanizaki’s sprawling, elegiac histor­ical novel The Makioka Sisters (1948) to the screen would seem an undertaking tailor-made for Kon Ichikawa. The renowned writer’s work was familiar territory for the veteran director, who had adapted the quirky Tanizaki novella...

Jun 6, 2011 — One Scene I lived in Zurich before joining Stanley Kubrick on his Napoleon project in 1969. Unfortunately, this film was never made, but I stayed with Stanley for another thirty years. It was in Zurich, in an art-house cinema, that...

May 26, 2011 — Last month, a new art-house theater opened here in Austin, the Violet Crown Cinema. (Our city has several pet names, and one of them is the City of the Violet Crown. Why it’s called that has been completely lost to...

May 24, 2011 — Andrei Tarkovsky belongs to that handful of filmmakers (Dreyer, Bresson, Vigo, Tati) who, with a small, concentrated body of work, created a universe. Though he made only seven features, thwarted by Soviet censors and then by cancer, each honored his...

May 17, 2011 — “There was a strong influence of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal throughout this film,” director Masahiro Shinoda would later remember of his 1964 squid-ink noir Pale Flower, made in the days when his career as a filmmaker and founding figure of...

May 3, 2011 — Ingmar Bergman’s exquisite carnal comedy turns a set of boudoir farce conventions into lyrical poetry.

Apr 22, 2011 — At a time when many talk of cinephilia as going the way of the woolly mammoth, it’s more than a little inspiring to come upon a place like the Aperture Cinema in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. This two-screen art-house theater (which...

Apr 14, 2011 — Performances Roberto Rossellini is not often discussed as a director of actors, and Vittorio De Sica is remembered less as a performer than as a filmmaker. Il generale della Rovere, Rossellini’s searing World War II morality drama from 1959 featuring...

Apr 12, 2011 — Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: “When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever their diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come...

Mar 22, 2011 — The Times of Harvey Milk is one of the defining monuments to the life and legacy of my late uncle Harvey Milk. It has also been a companion in many ways during my own journey as the openly gay nephew...