The Up Series

May 2, 2019 — When I first saw My Brilliant Career, when it was released in New York in 1980, I was ignorant of director “Gill” Armstrong. I assumed she was a man, because at the time I could count the female directors I...

Dec 18, 2018 — Half a century before Julien Duvivier made his 1946 film Panique, the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon published his influential study of mob behavior, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, in which he argued that recent upheavals in...

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...

Feb 23, 2017 — Repertory PicksThe Indiana University Cinema will screen Roberto Rossellini’s 1946 film Paisan on 35 mm this Saturday as part of its ongoing series of twentieth-century masterworks, City Lights. This unsparing depiction of Italy at the end of World War II...

Jan 4, 2017 — A new 4K restoration of French playwright, filmmaker, and novelist Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille Trilogy is now playing at New York’s Film Forum. Comprised of Alexander Korda’s Marius (1931), Marc Allégret’s Fanny (1932), and Pagnol’s César (1936), this legendary series, produced...

Apr 19, 2016 — In Whit Stillman’s second feature, cousins Fred and Ted Boynton (Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols) navigate an occasionally hostile culture and their own late transitions to adulthood.

Feb 16, 2016 — In Death by Hanging, Nagisa Oshima spins a complex aesthetic web around his documentary-like structure, packing detail, history, politics, and emotion into his surrealist inquiry into capital punishment.

Dec 10, 2014 — Social satire, women’s melodrama, queer metaphor, or horror movie? Todd Haynes’s elusive masterpiece is all of these and none of them.

Jun 9, 2014 — In the history of cinema, there have been several notable collaborations between a director and an actress over a series of films. Think of D. W. Griffith and Lillian Gish back in the silent era, Josef von Sternberg and Marlene...

Oct 21, 2013 — As a film star, John Cassavetes embodied the kinetic, wild-eyed, insanely grinning villain. He seemed born to the role, with his volatile energy and dynamic outbursts, luminous yet curiously deadened eyes, wide-gaping mouth (David Thomson has likened it to a...