Actors

Dec 29, 2008 — It is a good time to belong to the cult of Fuller. Those of us who consider ourselves members never forget our moment of induction. Some enlisted when his films first hit the screen—lucky enough to catch The Steel Helmet...

Dec 25, 2008 — Robert Rossellini’s efforts to put history into images would yield some forty-two hours of “didactic” movies, mostly for television.

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...

Dec 3, 2008 — Gliding on silvery reels of steel, and tricked out with Lars von Trier’s panoply of visual effects, the film ravishes with its elaborately storyboarded tunnel vision.

Nov 27, 2008 — Despite Samuel Fuller’s career-long penchant for giving controversial subjects a punchy, exploitation-movie spin, his twenty-first feature was the first to suffer outright suppression.

Nov 27, 2008 — A genuine cause célèbre, adapted from Romain Gary’s 1970 nonfiction novel, Samuel Fuller’s late work is an unusually blunt and suggestively metaphoric account of American racism.

Nov 27, 2008 — An enormous welter of insoluble problems is on display in Luis Buñuel’s classic—the ending solves nothing; the story just begins again.

Nov 23, 2008 — The possession of a real voice is always a marvel, an almost religious thing.

Nov 19, 2008 — Albert Lamorisse’s principled balancing of objective fact with childish wish fulfillment results in a new, paradoxical genre—the documentary of dreams.

Nov 16, 2008 — Chungking Express (1994) was the Masculin féminin of the 1990s, a pop-art movie about cool twentysomethings looking for love in the city that has replaced Paris as the center of the world-cinema imagination. What Jean-Luc Godard did for “the children...