Escape from New York

Aug 3, 2015 — On film noir’s unparalleled roster of resonant titles—Kiss of Death, Out of the Past, and Where Danger Lives, to name three—none is more emblematic or iconographically cogent than Night and the City. Juxtaposing two of noir’s essential, virtually ontological qualities,...

Jun 16, 2014 — Georges Franju evokes the surreal silent serials of Louis Feuillade while constructing his own personal cinematic paradise.

Sep 18, 2013 — This chapter about director Richard Linklater’s beginnings, from the 1996 book Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of American Independent Cinema, is by the former producer’s representative, creator and host of IFC’s Split Screen, and...

Aug 13, 2013 — John Frankenheimer burrows into the insidious side of the American sixties in his visually dazzling thriller.

Jul 31, 2013 — The story of the author’s long correspondence with the silent film icon.

Jun 25, 2013 — How Claude Lanzmann made a thoughtful film about the unthinkable and unfilmable.

Apr 23, 2013 — Who is Pierre Etaix and where has he been all your life? This is the story of a filmmaker who was vanished, banished, skipped over. It’s as if one of those invisible cubicles mimes are always getting themselves shut in...

Mar 18, 2013 — Using a 1958 murder spree as a narrative springboard, Terrence Malick fashioned a fractured fairy tale about American innocence lost.

Oct 23, 2012 — After winning an Oscar, John Schlesinger used his newfound artistic freedom to make a personal film in which homosexuality is treated as groundbreakingly ordinary.

Mar 27, 2012 — Written in five or six days in 1941, in a seaside hotel where he had gone to get away from the Blitz, and by all accounts scarcely revised before being mounted some six weeks later, Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit became...