Last Letter

Mar 13, 2019 — Women’s stories are central to five of the six top prize winners.

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...

Feb 20, 2019 — An overview of the award winners and a few critical and personal favorites.

Feb 19, 2019 — A master at adapting literary classics for the screen, Luchino Visconti made a bold choice in emphasizing the homoerotic undertones in Thomas Mann’s novella.

Feb 18, 2019 — The Swiss actor will be remembered for a range of characters spanning from heaven to hell.

Feb 15, 2019 — New restorations, a new trailer, new translations, a new publication, and new perspectives on an awesome and abhorrent film.

Jan 24, 2019 — Avant-garde cinema’s greatest champion—and one of its most accomplished practitioners—has died at ninety-six.

Dec 18, 2018 — Half a century before Julien Duvivier made his 1946 film Panique, the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon published his influential study of mob behavior, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, in which he argued that recent upheavals in...

Nov 23, 2018 — The work of James Agee (1909–1955) remains one of the touchstones of American movie criticism. An extraordinarily versatile writer, he won acclaim as a novelist, a poet, and a screenwriter (his scripts for The African Queen and The Night of the...

Oct 29, 2018 — Supporting roles bring potent flavor to classic Hollywood’s darkest genre. In the first installment of a series, Imogen Sara Smith pays tribute to the queen of character actors: Thelma Ritter.