The Father

Jun 21, 2011 — Chains: Bound for Glory Film history is replete with artists embraced by critics but misunderstood by the public. For Italian filmmaker Raffaello Matarazzo, it was the opposite. After working for almost two decades as a midlevel studio director of pictures...

Jul 26, 2010 — The Story of a Cheat: Breaking the Rules While most filmmakers arrive at their profession already possessed of a vigorous love of cinema, Sacha Guitry saw the form, at least at first, as a necessary evil. Paris’s most popular and prolific...

Apr 21, 2009 — “Just takes a few months to get to be a hundred. If you’re in the right place at the right time.” I first saw Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece The Wages of Fear when the restored version was released in the U.S.,...

Aug 11, 2008 —   WINGS: TAKING OFF Of all the dazzlingly talented filmmakers to emerge from the Soviet Union, Larisa Shepitko has remained one of the least widely known. While many of her film school contemporaries, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, and her...

Mar 26, 2007 — Across five films, the Swedish director defined his guiding themes and cinematic style.

Jan 16, 2007 — The marvel of Mouchette inheres in the elegance, obstinacy, and capaciousness of Bresson’s double-mindedness.

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...

Jan 17, 2005 — Jacques Becker’s crime film contains plenty of the requisite genre elements—double-crossings, violence, kidnappings, and gun battles—but it’s also a pensive meditation on age, friendship, and lost opportunities.

Jan 6, 2003 — “No one would claim that Lubitsch’s German films were more important than his American ones (cf. Fritz Lang).” This was Richard Roud’s response to my piece “Ernst Lubitsch: German Period” in his Cinema: A Critical Dictionary. One could indeed ask...

Feb 14, 2050 — No genre is as bound up with America’s conflicted self-image as the western. But despite being rooted in such a historically specific iconography, the genre has proven adaptable to a wide array of international settings, its influence creeping into the...