The Beloved

Mar 11, 2016 — Consider the story of Lolabelle, the rat terrier cast by Laurie Anderson—her human companion—in Anderson’s stirring, tender film Heart of a Dog.

Mar 29, 2013 — When the world’s favorite comedian asked his audience to see him as a sociopathic serial killer, he was venturing where cinema had barely dared to tread.

Oct 9, 2012 — British wartime audiences ate up these rule-breaking costume pictures—entertainments for a populace seeking escapism.

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,...

Aug 2, 2010 — The great, beloved screenwriter Suso Cecchi D’Amico died this past weekend at the age of ninety-six. A longtime collaborator of Luchino Visconti’s (they’re pictured together above), including on the epic The Leopard (1963), Cecchi D’Amico worked with just about every...

Sep 8, 2009 — “It’s not my fault that I’m Japanese . . . yet it’s my worst crime that I am!” The words are those of Kaji, hero of The Human Condition (1959–61), but in his anguish and existential despair, he also speaks...

Jan 21, 2008 — Agnès Varda seizes the kind of immediacy and tension associated, at the start of the sixties, with the cinema verité documentary movement and uses it to create a new form of fiction.

Nov 6, 2006 — The circumstances of our first encounters with movies are often as memorable as the movies themselves. Sometimes the juxtaposition of movie and circumstance seems merely accidental; but there are those films that change us enough that we can identify the...

Apr 10, 1989 — Two years after The Horse’s Mouth director Ronald Neame cast Alec Guinness in this film, based on a book by James Kennaway.

Jun 23, 2020 — In Céline Sciamma’s unabashedly romantic and fiercely political film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), two women fall in love and set each other free, if for only a few glorious days or weeks. It is one of the...