A New Year

Aug 9, 2010 — Now that Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb is fifteen years old, it seems pretty safe to say that it has evolved from a potential classic to actually being one. But what kind? A documentary portrait of a comic-book artist, musician, and nerdy...

Jul 13, 2010 — At the author’s request, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first. Nineteen thirty-six was a decisive year for imperial Japan, marked by extreme violence at home and abroad. In the very early morning of February 26,...

May 27, 2010 — Dismiss from your mind, momentarily at least, the John Ford we know, who could define himself with the three words “I make westerns.” Before Stagecoach (1939), Ford’s talking pictures played out in submarines, penitentiaries, and Scottish castles, in Mesopotamia, colonial...

May 25, 2010 — Between 1952 and 2003, depending on how the various serial works are counted, Stan Brakhage made somewhere between 350 and 400 films, about half of them short film poems under ten minutes in length, most of the rest between ten...

Apr 28, 2010 — Just over halfway through Ang Lee’s masterful Civil War drama Ride with the Devil, the small group of men at the story’s center, young, Southern-sympathizing Bushwhackers fighting in divided Missouri, meet up with other ragtag bands of rebels. Coalescing under...

Apr 26, 2010 — In the late 1940s, driven by the opening-night ovations for A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams embarked on more than a decade of immense success. During this period, he wrote at a furious pace: Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo,...

Feb 24, 2010 — Major Barbara: Stage to Screen It was one of the most improbable linkups in the history of either theater or cinema—as unlikely as Andrew Undershaft’s turning over his munitions empire to Adolphus Cusins, his not-quite-yet son-in-law (and newly declared “foundling”),...

Feb 17, 2010 — The feature film debut of British artist Steve McQueen, Hunger dramatizes the final weeks in the life of Irish Republican Army commander Bobby Sands and his death by hunger strike, aged twenty-seven, in 1981. Combining intense formal control and extreme...

Feb 9, 2010 — You can’t keep a good woman, or a great movie about a good woman, down. By all accounts, goodness in the real Lola Montez reflected the vagaries of character, not talent. She was, as Cosmo Brown says of Lina Lamont...

Dec 1, 2009 — Mick Jagger’s former assistant remembers the joy and chaos of touring with the Stones.