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Apr 24, 2012 — Among the most widely seen photographs of Hollis Frampton is one of him as a young man, a self-portrait taken in 1959, if we are to trust the narration he composed to accompany its inclusion in his 1971 film (nostalgia)....

Mar 27, 2012 — One Scene Along with Who’ll Stop the Rain and Charley Varrick, I first saw The Friends of Eddie Coyle on late-night TV when I was ten or eleven. It would be another twenty-five years before I got ahold of the...

Mar 27, 2012 — Written in five or six days in 1941, in a seaside hotel where he had gone to get away from the Blitz, and by all accounts scarcely revised before being mounted some six weeks later, Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit became...

Mar 27, 2012 — Noël Coward and David Lean created a patriotic diptych with their first two films: In Which We Serve, from 1942, about the bravery and sacrifice of British sailors and those who love them, and the 1944 This Happy Breed, on...

Mar 27, 2012 — Coward and Lean? It may not sound as natural as Launder and Gilliat or Powell and Pressburger, perhaps because we don’t instinctively think of Noël Coward as a filmmaker or of David Lean as part of a team. But they...

Mar 27, 2012 — The mysterious letter was signed “Joe.” David Lean’s lawyer had sent me a batch of old correspondence. Struggling with a biography of Lean, I was desperate for any leads, and this one seemed worth following up. But how does one...

Mar 13, 2012 — In the becalmed atmosphere of today’s Hollywood, it’s hard to imagine the tumult that greeted The Last Temptation of Christ when it was released in 1988. Brilliantly directed by Martin Scorsese, this adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s imaginative retelling of the...

Mar 9, 2012 — The cinematographer tells us how he and Louis Malle went about shooting Vanya on 42nd Street in a decrepit Manhattan theater.

Mar 7, 2012 — A celebration of one of the great cosmopolites of the twentieth century, in one of the cosmopolises he adored.

Feb 28, 2012 — In the long history of stage-to-screen translations, there’s never been anything quite like Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), an astonishing hybrid blurring the boundaries between theater and film, rehearsal and performance, actor and character. The production began in...