The Home Front

Jan 31, 2018 — The SXSW Film Festival, whose 2018 edition runs from March 9 through 18, has announced a lineup of 132 features—with more on the way. With descriptions from the festival . . . Narrative Feature CompetitionFamily. Director/Screenwriter: Laura Steinel. When an...

Oct 4, 2017 — “The strength of women left alone to fend for themselves is the communal focus of actor and director Xavier Beauvois’s The Guardians,” writes Notebook editor Daniel Kasman, introducing his interview with the director. “After directing Of Gods and Men (2010),...

Sep 28, 2017 — “If you’ve never seen The Last Detail, Hal Ashby’s 1973 comedy-drama about three Navy sailors on a debauched and ultimately tragic road trip, there are several reasons to rectify that,” begins Dana Stevens at Slate. “There’s a devilishly charismatic performance...

Dec 6, 2011 — The Lady Vanishes (1938) is the film that best exemplifies Alfred Htchcock’s often-asserted desire to offer audiences not a slice of life but a slice of cake. Even Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, in their pioneering study of Hitchcock, for...

Mar 27, 2012 — Good wartime propaganda films are as rare as good wars. Noël Coward and David Lean’s In Which We Serve, which had its premiere in Great Britain in September 1942, when the nation was entering the fourth year of hostilities with...

Jan 3, 2020 — The director of Margaret and Manchester by the Sea celebrates Hollywood’s greatest humanist, whose films are featured in a series now playing on the Criterion Channel.

Apr 1, 2020 — Are Snakes Necessary?, an erotically charged tale of revenge and political intrigue, naturally features a nod to Hitchcock.

Mar 13, 2012 — In the becalmed atmosphere of today’s Hollywood, it’s hard to imagine the tumult that greeted The Last Temptation of Christ when it was released in 1988. Brilliantly directed by Martin Scorsese, this adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s imaginative retelling of the...

Aug 3, 2010 — Sanshiro Sugata: A Career Blooms Moviegoers the world over know Akira Kurosawa for Rashomon (1950) and the international classics that followed—Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, High and Low. The filmmaker’s dazzling technique made his genre tales about samurai...

Alexander Nemerov is the author of Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures (2005), Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine (2016), and Summoning Pearl Harbor (2017), among other books. He is the chair of the Art and Art History...