These Three

Sep 29, 2003 — Fassbinder had long dreamed of a “German Hollywood film.” He sought not only success with the audience, but also professionalism. The auteur film in its purest form is an attempt to abolish the division of labor: the filmmaker represents in...

Sep 29, 2003 — Roman Polanski’s maiden feature would define his maverick status once and for all.

Aug 18, 2003 — One of the Swedish director’s most representative works, this drama’s portentousness, banked intensity, and recondite symbolism come near to embodying the popular stereotype of the Bergmanesque.

Aug 18, 2003 — The two versions of Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist romance offer case studies in Hollywood and European sensibilities as they existed in the early 1950s.

Jun 23, 2003 — A very brief history of the seminal documentary by Alain Resnais

Jun 23, 2003 — Alain Resnais’s antidocumentary never purports to “document” the heinous realities of the Holocaust; instead, it interrogates our responses.

May 26, 2003 — Transcription of a speech given by long-time Derek Jarman collaborator and friend, actress Tilda Swinton

Apr 28, 2003 — Federico Fellini both identifies with and satirizes the provinciality that forms his romantic comedy's central subject.

Apr 28, 2003 — The sense of the difficulty of a real assumption of adulthood gives François Truffaut’s final Antoine Doinel film an undercurrent of anguish, despite its surface lightness.

Jan 6, 2003 — “No one would claim that Lubitsch’s German films were more important than his American ones (cf. Fritz Lang).” This was Richard Roud’s response to my piece “Ernst Lubitsch: German Period” in his Cinema: A Critical Dictionary. One could indeed ask...