The Evidence of the Film

Dec 10, 2013 — In 1998, I interviewed Little Edie Beale, the surviving star of 1976’s Grey Gardens, one of the Maysles brothers’ numerous masterworks (Gimme Shelter, Meet Marlon Brando, and With Love from Truman are equal in technical and emotional innovation). Miss Beale,...

Sep 15, 2009 — Words are the trained fleas in David Mamet’s sidewalk circus—dirty words, often bloodstained, usually swarming, that perform their acrobatic stunts for gawkers who will likely get their pockets picked. That’s the reputation, anyhow. More than thirty years after he made...

Sep 29, 2008 — After Ozu died on his sixtieth birthday, December 12, 1963, some thirty-two diaries were discovered. They were from 1933 to 1963, and though a few years were missing, they offer a commentary on the life of the director and reveal...

Aug 6, 2026 — Kent Jones’s work as a director includes the multiple-award-winning Diane (2019); the documentary landmark Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015); and A Letter to Elia (2010), codirected with Martin Scorsese. A longtime collaborator of Scorsese’s, Jones cowrote the director’s epic documentary My Voyage to...

Jun 29, 2026 — In the run-up to the country’s 250th birthday, several venues are offering prompts for celebration and reflection.

Apr 20, 2023 — This month’s highlights include tributes to Jennifer Jason Leigh and Seijun Suzuki and a collection of Asian American films from the 1980s.

Feb 4, 2019 — All four of this year’s top prizewinners have been directed or codirected by women.

Sep 13, 2016 — Kenji Mizoguchi achieved the sublime with this structurally complex portrait of artistic ambition and female subjugation.

Oct 29, 2014 — George Sluizer’s singularly unsettling work of psychological terror is a model of lucid craftsmanship.

Apr 2, 2009 — Writing the screenplay with Suzanne Schiffman, I intended to do for the theater what I had done for the cinema in Day for Night: the chronicle of a troupe at work, within a framework respecting the unities of place, time,...