On Falling

Feb 12, 2020 — If you were born in Mexico City in the second half of  the twentieth century, you grew up feeling that everything could come tumbling down in a matter of minutes. You grew up amid the reverberation of past earthquakes—all their...

Jan 24, 2020 — All six feet two of Burt Lancaster is spread out next to Deborah Kerr as they kiss each other on the beach in From Here to Eternity (1953). This is one of the most famous movie love scenes, parodied and copied many...

Jan 17, 2020 — Of all the weird scenes that populate seventies science-fiction cinema, the most bizarre might be in 1971’s The Omega Man. Based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the film imagines a world in which fallout from a distant war has...

Jan 16, 2020 — Deep Dives The question that was asked of the great actors and actresses of silent film with the coming of sound was simple: Could they speak? Could they adapt the styles they had developed to the demands of dialogue and...

Jan 7, 2020 — The filmmaker, theater director, and Actors Studio instructor had a seemingly endless string of stories to tell.

Jan 7, 2020 — Understudies everywhere should take heart at the tale of Katharine Hepburn’s long history with the role of Linda Seton, the high-spirited but reclusive heiress she plays in George Cukor’s 1938 Holiday. When the Philip Barry play the film is based...

Dec 3, 2019 — Performances If there was one mother-daughter television date my busy mum was always willing to down tools for, it was a Bette Davis movie. Her favorite—and mine, for the preteen period when I gave the thumbs-up to anything my mother...

Nov 15, 2019 — It’s a strange feeling: adoring cinema while at the same time always sensing that it’s not made for you. This is how I felt growing up, at least. I came of age watching movies, crushing on them so hard that...

Oct 15, 2019 — After breaking through in Medium Cool, Forster floundered until Quentin Tarantino plucked him from undeserved obscurity nearly thirty years later.

Oct 11, 2019 — Highlighted this week are an alternative history, the state of the documentary, and the influence of Antonioni and Pialat.