The Swissmakers

Oct 4, 2019 — When I met Ann Carter in 2007 during the filming of a documentary about Hollywood producer Val Lewton, she was seventy years old, more than six decades removed from her starring role in Lewton’s The Curse of the Cat People....

Sep 30, 2019 — At first glance, Jean-Pierre Melville’s body of work might seem to display a schizophrenic split between two currents or tendencies. The first is in total symbiosis with the history of France and is rooted in the filmmaker’s own life, notably...

Sep 25, 2019 — With Polyester, his first movie to flirt with the mainstream, maverick filmmaker John Waters set out to send up the overripe Hollywood melodramas of yesteryear—but also “to make a movie that really stunk,” as he has put it. Inspired by...

Sep 18, 2019 — One Scene The way some rock fans talk about the sanctity of live music, you’d think it was a guaranteed path to transcendence. But of course most concerts fall far short of the sublime, and the thrill of breathing in...

Sep 17, 2019 — With his last completed film, the sly, suggestive comedy of manners Cluny Brown, Ernst Lubitsch brought to the screen one of the most irrepressible, irresistible Hollywood heroines of the forties. The niece of a plumber in a Britain on the...

Sep 16, 2019 — In a dark moment, Laurence Olivier often reached for a laugh. His lofty, somewhat burdensome reputation as his century’s greatest dramatic actor belies the mercurial essence of his craft, which was to seize upon the humanity in each of his...

Sep 13, 2019 — Nicholas Britell’s scores are so finely calibrated to the movies they inhabit that they become inextricable from the images on-screen. Whether it’s the staccato heartbeat of orchestral strings in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight or the mix of piano motifs and hip-hop...

Aug 21, 2019 — One Scene One of my absolute favorite quotes from Douglas Sirk—and he has a million of ’em—was made in reference to Magnificent Obsession. “It is a combination of kitsch and craziness and trashiness,” he said (this isn’t the quote quite...

Aug 20, 2019 — For the past twelve months I’ve been re-plunging into Ingmar Bergman. It began with a conference in Lund, Sweden, in June of 2018, to mark the centennial of his birth; numerous experts, among them contributors to Criterion’s mammoth edition last...

Aug 5, 2019 — At the San Francisco Silent Film Festival you can expect to see many great, even perfect, treasures of cinema, popular classics, and critical favorites. At the age of twenty-four, the event has become increasingly central to the silent cinema calendar—one...