The Old Way

Jun 15, 2017 — New York. “Among the most savage and surreal of Italian comedies, starring one of the country’s biggest stars”—Alberto Sordi—“and directed by one of its legendary filmmakers, Vittorio De Sica’s Il Boom barely made a ripple when first released, in 1963,...

May 22, 2017 — To toast the seventieth anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, which has been in full swing since last Wednesday, I’m spending this week looking back on a top-prize winner from each decade of the festival’s history, dishing up details on...

Apr 20, 2017 — Programmer Michael Sragow and former Film Society of Lincoln Center program director Richard Peña discuss the holy grail of cinephile TV series and the legendary figures it profiled.

Jan 20, 2015 — Here he is: the real, unreal Guy Maddin, in his phantasmagorical, polymathic stew of sex, memory, and dreams.

Nov 6, 2012 — When Akira Kurosawa made Rashomon (1950), he was a forty-year-old director working near the beginning of a career that would last fifty years, produce some of the greatest films ever made, and exert a tremendous and lasting influence on filmmaking...

Jan 21, 2008 — Married thrice and divorced from all of his wives at a time in Western culture when such marital fluctuation was rare, the playwright August Strindberg undoubtedly used his own dramatic life as a sourcebook.

Jan 22, 2007 — A delightfully old-fashioned morality tale, Robert Day’s low-budget space flick is far more than the standard monster fare it was initially sold as.

Oct 16, 2006 — Screenwriter Carlos Cuarón delves into the character played by Claudia Ramírez

Oct 18, 1994 — Val Lewton’s cinematic diamond-in-the-rough has been recognized for decades as a definitive chiller, but it was conceived as a title, with no story or notion in mind, and as a way of generating cash for RKO.

Jan 7, 1991 — Roman Polanski’s riposte to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was greeted as a brilliant, grisly potboiler that gave the thirty-two-year-old Polish filmmaker commercial entry to the West.