Illusions fantasmagoriques

Apr 25, 2025 — A busy week brings writing on the LA Rebellion, Jean-Luc Godard, and Elaine May, and a conversation with Pedro Almodóvar.

Apr 23, 2025 — World premieres of new restorations and plenty of anniversaries will be celebrated this year.

Sep 25, 2024 — At a time when women were understood to be the primary audience for movies, Hollywood studios built vehicles for actresses that doubled as showcases for the industry’s many brilliant female screenwriters.

Jun 24, 2024 — Costars and critics remember an outstanding actor who neither looked nor sounded like a movie star.

Feb 27, 2024 — Hollywood legend Raoul Walsh’s first movie for Warner Bros. is an epoch-spanning tall tale that takes inspiration from the New York City of his childhood and closes out a run of influential gangster films he inaugurated in the silent era.

Feb 14, 2024 — Portraits of Stanley Kubrick and Agnès Varda, a memoir from Ed Zwick, and a history of Blaxploitation are among the highlights.

Jan 8, 2024 — The National Society of Film Critics and the Golden Globes have us surveying the latest round of best-of-2023 lists and overviews.

Dec 12, 2023 — In the history of cinema, French director Albert Lamorisse is a unique figure. His intense focus on three subjects—children, animals, and flight—is distinctive, and the fact that all of his works clock in under ninety minutes (and most under an...

Dec 8, 2023 — Roy Waller (Nicolas Cage), the jittery protagonist of Ridley Scott’s 2003 crime comedy Matchstick Men, doesn’t like to think of himself as a common crook. “I’m a con artist,” he insists, and—in a frenzy of self-justification—further explains: “They give me...

Oct 17, 2023 — I. “Morbid Cinema” On October 10, 1962, there appeared a brief paragraph from the Associated Press: “Tod Browning, eighty-two, who directed scores of movies between 1917 and 1939, is dead. He succumbed Saturday after an illness, and no funeral plans...