Before the Night

May 24, 2016 — In The Player, Robert Altman’s early nineties comeback film, the director brilliantly skewers Hollywood—getting all the details right, as only he could—while constructing his own kind of Hollywood Movie.

Jun 11, 2015 — The author recalls the two great cinematographers and their work.

Nov 28, 2014 — It Happened One Night is part of a long tradition of American comedies on the move.

Nov 10, 2014 — Monte Hellman’s existential westerns take Beckett to the desert.

Jul 30, 2014 — A friend and longtime scholar of Jacques Demy ruminates on the great director’s career, as well as the port hometown they shared—which would become a magical movie location.

Jun 24, 2014 — In 1964, Richard Lester harnessed the Beatles’ exploding superstardom for a giddy day-in-the-life pop masterpiece.

Jan 30, 2013 — The improvisational arts of filmmaking, jazz, and chili.

Oct 4, 2011 — No film better illustrates Pier Paolo Pasolini’s challenge to conventional representations, to the social and cultural consensus, than his 1976 masterwork.

Jun 15, 2009 — With the arrival of this film, cinema catapulted to the front line of a cultural advance guard that sought to undermine the intractable mass taste promoted by Hollywood, television, and the Brill Building.

May 5, 2009 — Every second of David Fincher’s uncanny drama—every shot and every cut, every gesture and every facial expression, every turn in its narrative and every visual effect—is devoted to the contemplation of time’s passing.