The Cow

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...

Mar 27, 2012 — Coward and Lean? It may not sound as natural as Launder and Gilliat or Powell and Pressburger, perhaps because we don’t instinctively think of Noël Coward as a filmmaker or of David Lean as part of a team. But they...

Feb 15, 2012 — Comedy evolves. We long ago bid adieu to the physical acrobatics of Buster Keaton, the wisecracks of Bob Hope, the witty repartee of Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. The now-reigning comedy of embarrassment, seen in the films of Judd Apatow...

Jan 18, 2012 — Poto and Cabengo: Three-Part Harmony Jean-Pierre Gorin’s three Southern California movies are so militantly unclassifiable that terms like documentary or essay film seem as hopelessly out of sync with the recalcitrant and frequently exhilarating works themselves as a Marxist harangue in...

Mar 16, 2010 — More than a decade after his death in 1997, the moment is right for the rediscovery of the work of Marco Ferreri. “I think he’s modern. More than modern, in fact,” frequent collaborator Marcello Mastroianni once remarked, encapsulating how far...

Nov 18, 2018 — Ingmar Bergman scholar Peter Cowie explores how the great actor’s authoritative screen presence allowed him to embody the director’s fears and ideals.

Jun 26, 2000 — Brief Encounter was the fourth and final film that David Lean made in association with Noël Coward. Derived from Still Life, a one-act play which Coward included in the portmanteau Tonight 8:30, the story tells of a suburban housewife, Laura...

The critic and cowriter of Nightmare Alley explores the complexity of Gene Tierney’s femme fatale in Leave Her to Heaven, compares Adam Sandler and Paul Thomas Anderson’s work on Punch-Drunk Love to the collaboration of James Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock,...

The director of Cowboy Bebop shares his love for The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and how John Cassavetes blurred the line between fictional drama and realism, talks about what makes Branded to Kill a mesmerizing masterpiece, and finds inspiration...

The director and cowriter of Dune draws connections between the ways Krzysztof Kieślowski and Ingmar Bergman captured women on-screen, shares why Che is his favorite Steven Soderbergh film, and talks about how Lars von Trier broke the codes of cinema...