The Artist

Aug 9, 2010 — San Francisco filmmaker Terry Zwigoff’s first cinematic effort, the 1985 Louie Bluie, is a wry, ribald, and magical portrait of the country-blues string band player and irrepressible raconteur Howard Armstrong (a.k.a. Louie Bluie). This catchy, engaging sixty-minute documentary, a clattering...

Jan 12, 2010 — 8½: a bizarre and puzzling title, but one precisely appropriate for this film, which announces in its first frame that modernism has reached the cinema. If the mark of modernism in art is self-reference, 8½ surely goes beyond any predecessor...

Sep 29, 2003 — In May 1981, in the midst of shooting Lola, Rainer Werner Fassbinder sketched out his next film project: Sybille Schmitz. On the cover, he had written, “Story for a Feature Film*.” The asterisk pointed to this footnote: “It is possible...

Jul 9, 2018 — The product of consummate artistry and savvy promotion, Marlene Dietrich’s salacious image opened up erotic frontiers for a generation of moviegoers.

Oct 30, 2024 — The filmmaker struggled to emerge from the long shadow of one of the world’s most famous artists.

May 25, 1992 — If Max Ophuls hadn’t cooled his heels in Hollywood to flee the Nazis, his name might have conjured only the most unintelligible of foreign cinema—vague and inaccessible to the average American filmgoer. But in 1948 Ophuls was given an opportunity...

Jul 18, 2024 — Daniella Shreir, the translator of a collection of Duras’s writing on her films, has curated a comprehensive retrospective.

Apr 17, 2024 — Three of this month’s programs blast back to the turbulent midcentury moment when old Hollywood gave way to something new.

Aug 23, 2022 — Sidney Poitier’s directorial debut, a western depicting Black cowboy heroes, allowed two of the industry’s most significant Black stars to reorient themselves as artists.

Jun 26, 2019 — Boasting the longest, most versatile career of any Czechoslovak New Waver, the late master made films mixed with deep compassion and an antiauthoritarian spirit.