The Base

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...

Jul 26, 2011 — To a secular eye, Jean-Pierre Melville’s sixth feature film, Léon Morin, Priest (1961), is about almost anything except religion: the deleterious effects of sexual repression, the moral bleariness of wartime and life under occupation, the harsh inflections of history in...

Jun 27, 2011 — I’m not sure when I became a Peter Falk fan. I fondly remember watching Columbo on Sunday evenings with my parents more than forty years ago. I’m happy to say it’s a tradition that I’ve kept up with my own...

Apr 12, 2011 — A nightmare from which no one awakes, Claire Denis’ White Material (2009) takes place in a nameless African country teetering on the brink of all-out civil war. It is the veteran French director’s toughest work, unsparing with its characters and...

Dec 7, 2010 — Guillermo del Toro understands the power of fairy tales. Not the prettified romances of Charles Perrault, who tamed the Brothers Grimm for French drawing rooms, or the charming animal fables of Aesop, or the reassuring moral lessons Disney made of...

Nov 28, 2006 — Paris. We landed here yesterday at midday, and after a quick stop at our hotel, executive producer Fumiko Takagi and I headed straight to the offices of TF1 and Canal+ in Issy-les-Moulineaux for meetings. Issy is not what you think...

Sep 1, 1992 — The evolution of Jason and the Argonauts began in the late 1950s, after the initial success of 20 Million Miles to Earth. Harryhausen and his producer, Charles Schneer, decided to get away from doing “monster-on-the-loose” stories and try something more...

Mar 18, 2026 — Born in Pereira, Colombia, Lucrecia Dalt has carved out a distinctive space in contemporary music. Her trajectory from civil engineer to sound artist began while working at a geotechnical company in Medellín, where she discovered computer-based music production—a revelation that...

Sep 16, 2025 — King Princess—the project of Brooklyn-based vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, and actor Mikaela Straus—released her triumphant third record, Girl Violence, this month. Straus has also recently made her television debut in the new season of Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers, and later...

May 12, 2025 — Constance Tsang is a Chinese American writer, director, and educator based in New York. Her first feature, Blue Sun Palace, was awarded the French Touch Prize by the jury at the 2024 Cannes Critics’ Week and was an official selection...