And Then

May 5, 2014 — The celebrated divot points manfully toward the crest of the next hill, and the next, and the next, and to the horizon after that. Always forward! Into the sunset! Kirk Douglas is on the move: a wagon train of grimace,...

Feb 24, 2014 — A film of explosive passions, Abdellatif Kechiche’s coming-of-age triumph is about much more than just physical pleasure.

Oct 21, 2013 — As a film star, John Cassavetes embodied the kinetic, wild-eyed, insanely grinning villain. He seemed born to the role, with his volatile energy and dynamic outbursts, luminous yet curiously deadened eyes, wide-gaping mouth (David Thomson has likened it to a...

Jan 22, 2013 — With his unique use of new 3D technology, Wim Wenders found an unprecedented way for the movie camera to capture bodies in space.

Oct 30, 2012 — All of them actors? Nearly everyone wears a mask in Roman Polanski’s devilishly clever work of horror.

Mar 26, 2012 — A Night to Remember, the 1958 British film adaptation of Walter Lord’s 1955 book about the brief life and agonizing death of the Titanic, has proven unsinkable. With its Olympian yet unfailingly life-size view of the disaster that scuttled illusions...

Apr 25, 2011 — Brian De Palma brought hip, freewheeling funkiness to the American film renaissance of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Wised-up, cinema-savvy audiences across the country knew to seek out his movies for their scruffy wit, showmanship, and aesthetic innovation, not...

Thanks to the two most famous roles of her career—the enigmatic woman referred to only as A in Alain Resnais’ _Last Year at Marienbad_ and the middle-aged widow stuck in domestic routine in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du...

Mar 22, 2011 — In 1985, deep into the twelve-year reign of the Reagan-Bush administration, Rob Epstein mounted a Hollywood stage with Richard Schmiechen, both men resplendent in tuxedos. Epstein was only twenty-nine years old. The director had just made history, with producer Schmiechen,...

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...