Sing

Sep 21, 2010 — This is an expanded version of a piece that appeared in the original 2004 Criterion DVD release of Charade. Stanley Donen’s Charade occupies a special place among sixties thrillers. In an era of spy films resplendent with macho-driven eroticism (the...

Sep 17, 2010 — This has been a luminous year for the world-renowned Toronto International Film Festival, now in its thirty-fifth edition—and not only because of the high quality of the films. When the ten-day event began, buzz was already in the air about...

Sep 16, 2010 — Seven years ago, I was a bright-eyed recent university grad who had just moved to the big city—Toronto—for the first time. I was struggling to find my path as a filmmaker, and at the Toronto International Film Festival that year,...

Aug 24, 2010 — T he Docks of New York is one of those orphaned silents, released in 1928, the very end of the era. Apparently, it was previewed the same week as Al Jolson’s The Singing Fool, his first “all-talking” picture, the follow-up...

Aug 24, 2010 — Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928) was first and foremost a star vehicle for Emil Jannings, the internationally known, Swiss-born actor, who had left Germany in October 1926 to work for Paramount Pictures. During his two and a half...

Aug 24, 2010 — I n a photograph of Josef von Sternberg from 1937, he looks like a character from one of his own films: a turbaned magus with elegantly trimmed beard and mustache, holding a cigarette as he gazes out obliquely, with the...

Aug 18, 2010 — Before Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus showed up on American and European screens in 1959, what would later be known as the “art film” came in only a few shades of glum: Bergmanesque existentialism, Japanese samurai tragedy, stories of Italian peasant...

Aug 17, 2010 — In his defiantly maverick directing career, which yielded only ten features in thirty-five years, Maurice Pialat (1925–2003) was a stimulant and irritant, agitating the cozy pool of French cinema. His first effort, the lyrically bitter short essay film L’amour existe...

Jul 26, 2010 — The Story of a Cheat: Breaking the Rules While most filmmakers arrive at their profession already possessed of a vigorous love of cinema, Sacha Guitry saw the form, at least at first, as a necessary evil. Paris’s most popular and prolific...

Jul 19, 2010 — “It is the most erotic film that I have ever made,” wrote Michael Powell of Black Narcissus. “It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image, from the beginning to the end.”