Long Shot

Apr 27, 2017 — 1. As I began work on The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew and Associates, I knew that 1960’s Primary was really the birth of what we think of as the modern documentary: observational photography based on access to an interesting subject, presenting...

Feb 11, 2017 — Ermanno Olmi captures the dignity of work in this painterly vision of late nineteenth-century rural Italy.

Dec 26, 2016 — PerformancesTraveling through the subterranean portals of Videodrome like an introverted wraith, Deborah Harry carries herself with the wry, burned-out, but still titillated instincts of a voyager buying a one-way ticket for the outer limits. A vivid, smallish part can either...

May 17, 2016 — Juxtaposing a vision of a stark, primitive existence on a remote Japanese island with that country’s vast twentieth-century modernization, Kaneto Shindo reveals Japan’s postwar paradoxes and makes a case for its essential, immutable character.

Jun 29, 2015 — This work of hallucinatory lyricism was one of the final and freest expressions of the rule-flouting New Wave movement in Czechoslovakia.

Jun 4, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder stocked the cast of The Merchant of Four Seasons with friends and colleagues from his experimental theater days.

Apr 29, 2015 — Peter Yates's crime drama is a haunting, singular experience, brutal and minutely observed, with a remarkably authentic sense of place.

Mar 24, 2015 — Words—they conceal and reveal so much about us, as Errol Morris’s elusive and brilliant first films attest.

Mar 19, 2015 — The author recalls his encounters and correspondence with the filmmaker.

Jan 21, 2015 — Money can’t buy love and happiness in Preston Sturges’s classic comedy—or can it?