A Scene at the Sea

Apr 20, 2018 — Let’s catch up with the new issue of cléo journal, this one dedicated entirely to the work of Agnès Varda. When the journal launched five years ago, it took its name from Varda’s 1962 classic, Cléo from 5 to 7....

Nov 8, 2017 — Dave Kehr’s long reviews for the Chicago Reader, published between 1974 and 1986, comprise “a body of work that, together with Kehr’s columns for Chicago magazine in the 1980s, strikes me as being the most remarkable extended stretch of auteurist...

Oct 5, 2017 — For kicks, I’m opening this one with something I wrote myself back in February, just hours after seeing the film at the Berlinale: “Aki Kaurismäki’s uneven but irresistibly amusing The Other Side of Hope, dedicated to the late film historian...

Jul 17, 2017 — “Steven Spielberg laid claim to the Normandy beach landing,” begins Variety’s Peter Debruge, “Clint Eastwood owns Iwo Jima, and now, Christopher Nolan has authored the definitive cinematic version of Dunkirk. Unlike those other battles, however, this last was not a...

Nov 5, 2015 — Julien Duvivier’s early sound films offer emotionally rich explorations of life in prewar France.

Jun 17, 2013 — The silent legend practices slapstick with clockwork precision in his most iconic, astonishing comedy.

May 8, 2012 — To start on a personal note: I wrote a book about La haine that came out in November 2005, just as the Paris suburbs (banlieues) erupted in an unprecedented wave of violence. Every night, as in the Bob Marley song we...

Apr 15, 1992 — When President Kennedy announced that Ian Fleming’s novels were amongst his favorite bedside reading, the international stage was set for the entrance of a new cinematic character. His name was Bond—James Bond. In 1962, Dr. No burst onto the screen...

May 26, 2026 — Women’s hands dance over typewriter keys. The percussive racket they make, like the tapping of an unruly chorus line, takes the place of music during the opening credits of The Office Wife (1930), which appear over a montage of female...

Aug 16, 2011 — “It is my best film. I always loved it. I always believed in it. It is real cinema, done for cinema—like art for art.” That was Roman Polanski’s view of Cul-de-sac in 1970, four years after its release and just...