The House Is Black

Oct 27, 2017 — New York. Hank and Jim, running at Film Forum from today through November 16, is a companion series to Scott Eyman’s new book, Hank and Jim: The Fifty-Year Friendship of Henry Fonda and James Stewart. Today “offers back-to-back Hitchcock movies,”...

Jul 20, 2017 — This year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato wrapped nearly three weeks ago now, and it’s the kind of festival that has attendees reflecting on each edition months and undoubtedly years down the line. Three especially notable pieces have appeared in just the...

Sep 23, 2002 — The theatricality of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller makes the point that psychoanalysis is a sister to cinema rather than a rival.

Oct 9, 2000 — One of the most meticulously crafted supernatural fantasy films ever made, Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964) is also one of the most unusual. While such classic black and white chillers as The Uninvited, The Innocents and The Haunting teasingly speculate on...

Dec 15, 1986 — It has been estimated that one out of four feature films made in America before the mid-1960s was a western. Since approximately 35,000 features were released in this country in the 70 years after the introduction of film, this would...

Oct 16, 2018 — Seen as a light-hearted farce upon its release, this star-studded comedy by Hal Ashby stands as one of Hollywood’s most prescient portraits of post-Watergate politics.

Oct 25, 2012 — The following piece by Sunday Bloody Sunday screenwriter Penelope Gilliatt originally appeared as the introduction to the 1971 U.S. publication of the script. A friend of mine who had started scrubbing at fourteen and went on to be a barmaid...

Sep 20, 2012 — The following is excerpted from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by the late Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona...

Mar 15, 2016 — Set during the height of McCarthy-era paranoia and arriving in 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Frankenheimer’s high-anxiety Communist conspiracy thriller tapped into the darkest fears of Cold War America.

May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...