Times For

Feb 28, 2011 — In 1969, director Alexander Macken­drick retired from the film industry and became founding dean of the film school at the newly established California Institute of the Arts. Passionately interested in the pedagogy of cinema (“Film writing and directing cannot be...

Feb 20, 2011 — Melodrama has a bad reputation because it has been abandoned to schematic and conventional interpretation. —Luchino ViscontiSenso, Luchino Visconti’s extraordinarily lush 1954 movie, was never truly released in America. Even though an American star, Farley Granger, and a European star,...

Feb 8, 2011 — Federico Fellini was born and brought up in Rimini, Italy, a small seaside town in the province of Emilia-Romagna. Amarcord is a neologism he contrived, which comes closest to the Emiliano-Romagnolo dialect phrase mi ricordo (I remember). Fellini, a great...

Feb 7, 2011 — Death looms over the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda. His first fiction feature, Maborosi (1995), is a quiet study of bereavement, about a young woman struggling to move on after her husband’s inexplicable suicide. In After Life (1998), a supernatural fable...

Feb 1, 2011 — When Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Véronique was first screened at Cannes, in 1991, the critical reception was rapturous. Georgia Brown declared in the Village Voice, “Anything I say about [the film] is merely a labored minuet danced around...

Jan 18, 2011 — By 1963, when he started filming Shock Corridor on a rented soundstage, Samuel Fuller had come ruefully and puckishly to view himself as a “Lindy,” a diminutive for Charles Lindbergh designating a prostitute who, like the famous aviator, operates solo,...

Jan 10, 2011 — I was deeply saddened by today’s news of the passing of Peter Yates, whom I had the honor to meet while producing Criterion’s DVD for his great seventies crime picture The Friends of Eddie Coyle. His death marks the loss...

Dec 7, 2010 — In 1981, it seemed to me that a new era of fantastic cinema was upon us.

Dec 7, 2010 — Guillermo del Toro understands the power of fairy tales. Not the prettified romances of Charles Perrault, who tamed the Brothers Grimm for French drawing rooms, or the charming animal fables of Aesop, or the reassuring moral lessons Disney made of...

Dec 2, 2010 — Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1968) opens in a shiny space: nuns breeze past; a woman in a white uniform clacks through, bearing towels; a baby cries. People wait. The feeling is “hospital.” A second woman in white delivers towels, and we...