Up and Down

Oct 23, 2014 — The author recalls meeting the filmmaker in a Swedish hotel in the ’70s.

Jun 16, 2014 — Georges Franju evokes the surreal silent serials of Louis Feuillade while constructing his own personal cinematic paradise.

Mar 4, 2014 — The great documentarian Claude Lanzmann’s new movie, made from footage he didn’t use in Shoah, provides a fascinating glipse at the way he began that monumental project.

Feb 18, 2014 — The immediacy of an ongoing war electrifies Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful second Hollywood feature.

Sep 24, 2013 — Marketed as a movie of volcanic passion, Roberto Rossellini’s first film with Ingrid Bergman is rather a pragmatic take on the negotiations of matrimony.

Jun 26, 2012 — Hiroshi Inagaki’s action epic is as responsible for creating Toshiro Mifune’s legendary cinematic persona as the films of Kurosawa.

Feb 21, 2012 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s only work of science fiction, World on a Wire (1973) is surely one of the most obscure items among the forty-odd titles that constitute his filmography. Originally a two-part miniseries broad­cast on West German television, it had...

Feb 15, 2012 — Comedy evolves. We long ago bid adieu to the physical acrobatics of Buster Keaton, the wisecracks of Bob Hope, the witty repartee of Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. The now-reigning comedy of embarrassment, seen in the films of Judd Apatow...

Jul 12, 2011 — Naked is the angriest, most bitterly critical attack on the false values of society that Mike Leigh, Britain’s constant chronicler of the tragic comedy of desperate lives, has ever made. Its audacity is that the attack is mounted through a...

May 3, 2011 — Ingmar Bergman’s exquisite carnal comedy turns a set of boudoir farce conventions into lyrical poetry.