Échappement libre

Jan 14, 2022 — This week we’re watching and reading about Tom Noonan, Jean Vigo, Marie-Claude Treilhou, and Miklós Jancsó.

Nov 29, 2021 — The composer and lyricist who reinvented the American musical was “more of a film buff than a theater buff.”

Sep 29, 2021 — Luchino Visconti’s scandalous antifascist melodrama envisions the liquidation of desire with expressionistic panache.

May 21, 2020 — Deep Dives “Right then, get dressed!” my mother sang out once a year when I was a child. “We’re going down the Lane,” and I was at the front door with my coat on before she was. The Lane was...

Mar 31, 2020 — Everybody loves Show Boat, but where is the love for the woman whose name alone sits above the title in James Whale’s dazzling 1936 film version? Edna Ferber was a best-selling novelist for decades, and in her peak years also...

Mar 25, 2020 — As the Austin festival announces its award winners, many are wondering whether the entire festival circuit will be going online.

Jul 30, 2019 — One Scene Though he works in the highly stylized realm of the horror genre, Ari Aster’s acute attention to the fraught dynamics of intimate relationships—evident in his psychologically penetrating new film Midsommar—makes it easy to see how he draws inspiration...

Apr 18, 2018 — Before we lost Milos Forman and Vittorio Taviani over the weekend, the Slovak Spectator reported that Juraj Herz, the Czech actor and director best known for his 1968 film The Cremator, had passed away at the age of eighty-three. Just...

Mar 22, 2018 — Composer Richard Einhorn talks about conceiving the oratorio Voices of Light, which has often accompanied Carl Theodor Dreyer’s he Passion of Joan of Arc over the past quarter century.

Nov 2, 2017 — In the Village Voice, Bilge Ebiri looks back to the day in 1992 when, as a college freshman, he dropped everything, skipped his classes, and took a train from New Haven to New York to see a movie: Orson Welles’s...