Free Fall

Apr 26, 2010 — In the late 1940s, driven by the opening-night ovations for A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams embarked on more than a decade of immense success. During this period, he wrote at a furious pace: Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo,...

Feb 9, 2010 — You can’t keep a good woman, or a great movie about a good woman, down. By all accounts, goodness in the real Lola Montez reflected the vagaries of character, not talent. She was, as Cosmo Brown says of Lina Lamont...

Dec 1, 2009 — The deeply disturbing drama of this landmark documentary about the Rolling Stones sprang from the disturbing drama of the times.

Dec 1, 2009 — Mick Jagger’s former assistant remembers the joy and chaos of touring with the Stones.

Dec 1, 2009 — Running a taut ninety-one minutes, this documentary about the Rolling Stones is a masterpiece of restraint and understatement.

Sep 22, 2009 — Something very heavy happened at Monterey last weekend. Those very odd three days began in Friday’s cool gray air as the first of the crowd began to circle through the booths of the fairground. The only word for it then...

Dec 25, 2008 — Robert Rossellini’s efforts to put history into images would yield some forty-two hours of “didactic” movies, mostly for television.

Nov 2, 2008 — To see the gorgeous Fanfan la Tulipe is to go back in time twice over: to the film’s eighteenth-century French setting and to the international cinema world of more than fifty years ago, when this genial action farce was initially...

May 12, 2008 — Today it may be hard to understand the shock waves that Louis Malle’s romantic drama created with its “frank” depiction of a woman’s sexual pleasure, but in the context of late-1950s France, it was a bombshell.

Jun 25, 2007 — Chris Marker’s masterpiece is a cinematic essay and travel film made up of asides and digressions that form a portrait of late twentieth-century civilization.