The Two Sides

Jun 11, 2019 — The problem with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, everyone agrees, is that there is never enough dancing. You have to wait through often silly plots and hit-or-miss comedy for the musical numbers that are the whole point. But the dances...

Mar 26, 2019 — It’s the afternoon of February 8, 1964, and Ed Sullivan has assembled a gaggle of CBS ushers to talk about tomorrow night’s show, featuring the four lads from Liverpool who call themselves the Beetles—strike that, the Beatles. He needs to...

Jul 24, 2018 — A feast of sumptuous color and cinematic imagination, Powell and Pressburger’s postwar masterpiece is also a powerful reckoning with recent history.

Aug 15, 2017 — Walter Matthau solidified his reputation as a formidable comedic force in this delightful Cold War espionage romp.

Apr 5, 2017 — At eighty-eight years old, Agnès Varda is still blossoming as an artist. Long known primarily as a filmmaker, a vocation she took up more than half a century ago, the French iconoclast is now in what she gleefully describes as...

Oct 21, 2014 — There were plenty of advantages to living in Paris in the early 1970s, especially if one was a movie buff with time on one’s hands. The Parisian film world is relatively small, and simply being on the fringes of it...

Sep 16, 2014 — The following interview is from filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s 1997 book Lynch on Lynch. The interviews in the book were conducted by Rodley between January 1993 and December 1996. Eraserhead took five years to complete. You must have been...

May 23, 2012 — Iranian master director Abbas Kiarostami voyaged to Italy to make a film that questions love, relationships, and Western art cinema.

Mar 27, 2012 — Coward and Lean? It may not sound as natural as Launder and Gilliat or Powell and Pressburger, perhaps because we don’t instinctively think of Noël Coward as a filmmaker or of David Lean as part of a team. But they...

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...