The Presence

Sep 20, 2019 — In the winter of 1981, when I was young, I fell madly in love with a handsome poet. About two weeks into our affaire de cœur, we went to the Thalia on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to see...

Jun 12, 2017 — Informed by his work in theater and his travels through rural America, Nicholas Ray brought an outsider’s perspective to genre filmmaking in his debut feature.

Jul 13, 2015 — “I think that in a few years, in ten, in twenty, or thirty years, we shall know whether Hiroshima mon amour was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema.” That was Eric Rohmer,...

Feb 11, 2015 — With its provocative ambiguities, tender compassion, and fragmented editing style, this supernatural classic is a pure dose of Nicolas Roeg.

Aug 25, 2014 — Love and death tango in Bob Fosse’s glittering ode to his own mortality.

Dec 10, 2013 — In 1998, I interviewed Little Edie Beale, the surviving star of 1976’s Grey Gardens, one of the Maysles brothers’ numerous masterworks (Gimme Shelter, Meet Marlon Brando, and With Love from Truman are equal in technical and emotional innovation). Miss Beale,...

Jul 22, 2013 — Gabriel Axel’s exquisite adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s short tale of grace through art provides spiritual and sensual sustenance.

Dec 11, 2012 — Cinema is both an educational tool and a vessel for kinetic, avant-garde expression for filmmaker and activist Godfrey Reggio.

Feb 7, 2012 — La Jetée (1963) and Sans Soleil (1983), made a tidy twenty years apart, are the twin peaks of Chris Marker’s creative achievements and his best-loved and most widely seen films. But who is Chris Marker? Writer, photographer, editor, filmmaker, videographer,...

Nov 8, 2011 — Upon its release in the U.S. in 1983, the theatrical version of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander generated a wealth of controversy. Bergman has always seemed to breed conflict among cineastes (Phillip Lopate, for example, has written recently about the...