The Swissmakers

Feb 25, 2013 —

Dec 18, 2012 — With the stage musical Les Misérables coming to the big screen in one of Hollywood’s most anticipated releases of the holiday season, it seemed a good time to remind you about Raymond Bernard’s extraordinary 1934 cinematic adaptation of Victor Hugo’s...

Dec 6, 2012 — Today, Brazil is a widely, feverishly loved film, but once upon a time it had its share of detractors—specifically, those who financed it and released it in the U.S. In the documentary The Battle of “Brazil,” critic Jack Mathews charts...

Dec 5, 2012 — The following is excerpted from an interview that originally appeared in the February 1, 1981, issue of L’avant-scène: Cinéma. It was conducted by Olivier Eyquem and Jean-Claude Missiaen. Eyquem is a documentalist and former staff member at Positif; he blogs...

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...

Nov 5, 2012 — The following originally appeared as the afterword to the 2003 New American Library edition of the novel Rosemary’s Baby. Having observed that the most suspenseful part of a horror story is before, not after, the horror appears, I was struck...

Oct 11, 2012 — Repertory PicksBAMcinématek in Brooklyn is looking back to the nineties for a celebration of the period in American and British independent cinema when a wide array of gay and lesbian artists built their own movement. The series Born in Flames:...

Oct 4, 2012 — Louis Malle is remembered primarily as a fiction filmmaker, but he had a parallel career as a documentarian. In fact, he got his start in nonfiction: when he was just twenty-three years old, Malle was given the opportunity to collaborate...

Sep 25, 2012 —

Sep 18, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s theatrical spectacle set in early nineteenth-century Paris is an operatic work about passion and artifice.