The Mechanic

Feb 11, 2008 — Though today he is most fondly remembered for his later romantic comedies, typifying Hollywood filmmaking in its heyday, it should be known that Ernst Lubitsch was also a pioneer of the modern movie musical.

Sep 29, 2025 — Notes on new studies of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick and biographies of Jane Birkin and Terrence Malick.

Feb 14, 2022 — A ’20s jazz hit provides a rare moment of peace in Howard Hawks’s frenzied screwball comedy.

Nov 16, 2021 — Tsui Hark’s epic martial-arts saga revolutionized Hong Kong cinema by presenting a complex portrait of modern Chinese history and setting a gold standard in action choreography.

Jul 6, 2021 — Howard Hawks’s madcap battle of the sexes is a reminder of how necessary and sneakily profound silliness can be.

Jan 17, 2020 — Of all the weird scenes that populate seventies science-fiction cinema, the most bizarre might be in 1971’s The Omega Man. Based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the film imagines a world in which fallout from a distant war has...

May 2, 2019 — “To begin with, Gone with the Wind is a woman’s story . . . Mr. Cukor, one of Hollywood’s finest directors and the man who has directed Hepburn and Garbo in some of their best, is known as a woman’s...

Mar 12, 2019 — By dint of perseverance, Harold Lloyd, the modest son of Burchard, Nebraska, became the prince of Hollywood, California, where he lived the Horatio Alger dream. His life and his memorable films alike echo Alger’s theme of young men who apply...

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...

Jul 30, 2018 — At a time when women were rarely seen behind the camera, Babette Mangolte created a bold, distinctive aesthetic with a mix of slow rhythms and hauntingly static compositions.