Film Portrait

Nov 8, 1999 — In The Third Man—probably the greatest British thriller of the postwar era—director Carol Reed and screenwriter Graham Greene set a fable of moral corruption in a world of near-Byzantine visual complexity: the streets and ruins of occupied Vienna. It is...

Jan 11, 1999 — In 1910 Sir William Mackenzie hired Robert Flaherty to prospect the vast area east of the Hudson Bay for its railway and mineral potential. Over the course of several years and through four lengthy expeditions Flaherty had frequent contact with...

Jan 11, 1999 — This epic reimagining of medieval Russia was the most historically audacious production made in the twenty-odd years after Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.

Jan 7, 1997 — Vivre sa vie, made in 1962, was the fourth of Jean-Luc Godard’s films. He had so far turned out a gangster-movie knockoff (Breathless), a dark political picture (Le Petit soldat), and a sort-of-musical comedy (Une femme est une femme). Now...

Oct 25, 1994 — Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary, made for less than $3000 over 5 days of principal photography, manages to be twenty years ahead of its time and perfectly of its time. Spiritual forebear to the contemporary low-budget American independent film movement...

Oct 18, 1994 — It’s useless to take a lofty view on an instant schlock horror classic, but there are reasons why John Carpenter’s Halloween, alone in the last decade, stands with George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and, before that, with...

Jan 7, 1991 — Roman Polanski’s riposte to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was greeted as a brilliant, grisly potboiler that gave the thirty-two-year-old Polish filmmaker commercial entry to the West.

Dec 3, 1984 — Since the dawn of the sound era, an estimated 25,000 feature-length films have been produced—and that’s in the English language alone. When, in the early 1960s, an international group of film critics were polled as to their “number-one film of...

Jun 16, 2009 — In Tempo di viaggio (1983), the doodle Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra made for Italian TV as they prepped Nostalghia, the great struggling Russian answers a question about genre films by saying that his Solaris (1972) is “not so good,”...

Feb 5, 2009 — “Around the time that the KKK rode to victory in The Birth of a Nation (1915), Al Jolson applied burned cork to his face in The Jazz Singer (1927), and scores of African-American actors bowed, scraped, shucked, and jived in...