Come and See

May 18, 2020 — It’s hard to imagine Hollywood without Frances Marion. The story of the screenwriter’s career is entwined with the story of Hollywood itself, from its pioneer days to the Golden Age. Part of Marion’s skill as a writer was how her...

Nov 19, 2018 — Billy Wilder proves himself one of cinema’s greatest pleasure seekers in this irresistible confection, a landmark of Hollywood comedy.

Feb 27, 2018 — Director Tony Richardson refracts the bawdy spirit of the 1960s through this brilliantly distilled take on an eighteenth-century picaresque.

Feb 6, 2017 — In the inaugural installment of his new column, archivist Michael Chaiken examines the Nobel Prize–winning icon’s unique artistic process through a collection of ephemera.

Sep 28, 2016 — “King of the Nudies” Russ Meyer injects his transgressive exuberance into this big-studio send-up of Hollywood debauchery.

Mar 30, 2014 — 1. In 1964, Ingmar Bergman wrote a script for a film titled The Cannibals. It was to star Bibi Andersson, and included a small part for the up-and-coming Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, but it was ultimately tabled when Bergman became very ill...

Jul 24, 2012 — Trained as a musician, Jean Grémillon became one of French cinema’s most lyrical artists. His most beloved films were made during World War II.

Dec 6, 2011 — The Lady Vanishes (1938) is the film that best exemplifies Alfred Htchcock’s often-asserted desire to offer audiences not a slice of life but a slice of cake. Even Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, in their pioneering study of Hitchcock, for...

Jun 23, 2010 — “Wittily written and spare as a coded message . . . The year’s most perilous ride . . . , we wouldn’t exchange it for a season’s commutation ticket on most of the similar vehicles running out of Hollywood.” So...

Nov 22, 2009 — “The most concrete emblem of every economic cycle is the dump,” writes Naples native and best-selling Italian muckraker Roberto Saviano somewhere near the conclusion of his extraordinary 2006 “nonfiction novel” Gomorrah, a seethingly cogent and literarily constructed indictment of the...