From What Is Before

May 24, 2016 — In The Player, Robert Altman’s early nineties comeback film, the director brilliantly skewers Hollywood—getting all the details right, as only he could—while constructing his own kind of Hollywood Movie.

Mar 17, 2016 — Decades later, Ingmar Bergman’s self-reflexive masterpiece remains a provocative enigma worthy of close investigation.

Nov 24, 2015 — In Dont Look Back, legendary documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker employs his revolutionary new camera and Direct Cinema style to capture the multiple essences and contradictions of a young Bob Dylan making his way across England in 1965.

Sep 25, 2013 — Roberto Rossellini’s tale of modern sainthood demonstrates the importance of opening oneself to the wider world.

Jun 26, 2013 — On the life and work of the famous Czech author, and the pleasures and challenges of translating him.

Jun 20, 2013 — The prophetic voice of H. G. Wells resonates throughout this singularly ambitious, spectacularly designed vision.

Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...

Mar 26, 2013 — Charlie Chaplin manages to make a ruthless murderer likable in his brilliant satire of middle-class morality.

Apr 17, 2012 — Maybe it is something to do with the sensual seductiveness of cinema: as new-millennium Americans, we care nothing for Japa­nese poetry, little for Japanese painting and fiction, and certainly too much for Japanese cartoons, and yet Yasujiro Ozu, the least...

Oct 11, 2011 — A. E. W. Mason’s sweeping action novel The Four Feathers (1902) had already inspired three films by the time producer Alexander Korda got to it in 1939. It would be filmed three more times afterward. But you really haven’t seen it...