Love Letters

Nov 21, 2012 — In his films as well as his poems, novels, and short stories, Pier Paolo Pasolini evinced a love of vernacular speech, often choosing to write in the slangy argots of the working class and the dispossessed. He made his adaptation...

Oct 25, 2012 — The following piece by Sunday Bloody Sunday screenwriter Penelope Gilliatt originally appeared as the introduction to the 1971 U.S. publication of the script. A friend of mine who had started scrubbing at fourteen and went on to be a barmaid...

Feb 7, 2012 — La Jetée (1963) and Sans Soleil (1983), made a tidy twenty years apart, are the twin peaks of Chris Marker’s creative achievements and his best-loved and most widely seen films. But who is Chris Marker? Writer, photographer, editor, filmmaker, videographer,...

Nov 16, 2010 — The Night of the Hunter (1955)—the first film directed by Charles Laughton and also, sadly, the last—is among the greatest horror movies ever made, and perhaps, of that select company, the most irreducibly American in spirit. It’s about those venerable...

Dec 1, 2009 — This nonfiction masterwork by David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin is a terrifying snapshot of the sudden collapse of the sixties.

Apr 2, 2009 — Writing the screenplay with Suzanne Schiffman, I intended to do for the theater what I had done for the cinema in Day for Night: the chronicle of a troupe at work, within a framework respecting the unities of place, time,...

Dec 29, 2008 — It is a good time to belong to the cult of Fuller. Those of us who consider ourselves members never forget our moment of induction. Some enlisted when his films first hit the screen—lucky enough to catch The Steel Helmet...

Sep 18, 2006 — Released in 1973, in the dying days of General Franco’s forty-year dictatorship, The Spirit of the Beehive soon established itself as the consummate masterpiece of Spanish cinema. Yet, strangely, many of the gifted artists who collaborated on Víctor Erice’s first...

Mar 27, 2006 — Louis Malle’s World War II–era drama follows a young collaborationist in rural France and asks how people with no interest in politics become active participants in brutal torture.

Jun 27, 2005 — Kô Nakahira’s taboo-busting melodrama heralded a reinvention of Japanese cinema.