Match Point

Feb 14, 2013 — David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s textbook Film Art, a cornerstone of the cinema studies discipline, was first published in 1979 and is now in a tenth edition. Over the years, some sections have been taken out, either to make room...

Jan 16, 2013 — Both sparkling and suspenseful, Alfred Hitchcock’s benchmark thriller is the perfect getaway, and it set the scene for much of the master’s later work.

Dec 5, 2012 — The following is excerpted from an interview that originally appeared in the February 1, 1981, issue of L’avant-scène: Cinéma. It was conducted by Olivier Eyquem and Jean-Claude Missiaen. Eyquem is a documentalist and former staff member at Positif; he blogs...

Aug 29, 2012 — With humor and melancholy, Franc Roddam’s coming-of-age drama, based on the Who’s iconic album, shows us a g-g-generation on the edge.

Jul 14, 2012 — Simply stated, Wes Anderson is the most original presence in American film comedy since Preston Sturges. He is as boundlessly confident as  Sturges was in his heyday, and he has a similarly keen ear for gaudy dialogue; a gift for...

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

May 22, 2012 — These five films chart the unlikely ascendance of a hero of American underground cinema.

May 9, 2012 — The paradox of the biopic is that the need to give fictional characters the kind of messy, defining behavior that makes them ring true—makes them, in the vocabulary of development, “relatable”—is usually overlooked when an actual life is condensed into...

Mar 21, 2012 — The famed collaboration between director Mikhail Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, which, with its distinctive combination of effective melodrama and a wild, powerful visual style, helped make Kalatozov the most successful Soviet cinematic export of his generation, in fact spanned...

Dec 6, 2011 — The Lady Vanishes (1938) is the film that best exemplifies Alfred Htchcock’s often-asserted desire to offer audiences not a slice of life but a slice of cake. Even Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, in their pioneering study of Hitchcock, for...