Two to One

Dec 21, 2008 — In 1962, Roberto Rossellini called a press conference in a bookshop in Rome and announced that the cinema was dead. “There’s a crisis not just in film but culture as a whole,” he explained. Increasingly, Rossellini had understood the great...

Nov 19, 2008 — My first trip to Paris took place inside the darkened cafeteria of Warnsdorfer Elementary School in East Brunswick, New Jersey. A few times each year, the entire student body was brought together to watch movies cast from a rickety 16...

Sep 15, 2008 — Max Ophuls’s 1952 comedy celebrates existence by presenting a world full of unresolvable contradictions.

Aug 18, 2008 — This modest-scale psychological drama by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger follows an explosives expert with a drinking problem who harbors a great deal of bitterness.

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...

Jun 16, 2008 — Claude Sautet occupies a unique place in French cinema. Although he directed some of the biggest hits of the seventies and worked with some of the biggest stars, few critics considered him an “auteur” in his lifetime. Paradoxically, it was...

Mar 17, 2008 — Francesco Rosi’s film is a painstakingly documented reconstruction of the nefarious relationships between the Mafia, banditry, and economic and political power in Sicily between 1943 and 1950.

Feb 18, 2008 — At the climax of Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), a helicopter descends from the night sky onto a plaza where the colonial buildings are ablaze and an army of mercenaries is disintegrating . . .

Feb 18, 2008 — Actor and writer Linda Sandoval met Alex Cox in 1983, when her husband, Miguel Sandoval, was cast in Repo Man (she recalls that Cox phoned to say he had good news and bad news: the bad news was that Miguel...

Jan 21, 2008 — The feminist politics of Agnès Varda’s marital drama were ahead of their time, but it is on the level of form that the film is so unsettling and calls up contradictory interpretations.