The Goumbé of the Young Revelers

Sep 13, 2012 — Horror fans might assume that director Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead movies wrote the book on cursed bibles of the damned. But years earlier, in 1967, The Equinox . . . A Journey into the Supernatural, one of the films in this week’s...

Aug 29, 2012 — With humor and melancholy, Franc Roddam’s coming-of-age drama, based on the Who’s iconic album, shows us a g-g-generation on the edge.

Jul 11, 2012 — Performances Of all the stultified suburban folks in The Ice Storm, Ang Lee’s diamond-sharp adaptation of Rick Moody’s novel about two Connecticut families in the early seventies, Sigourney Weaver’s Janey Carver might appear the least in need of attention. Most...

Jun 21, 2012 — The following interview with actor Ruth Gordon originally appeared in the April 4, 1971, edition of the New York Times. “Have ya gotta angle for the story?” The accent—part New England hayseed, part Dead-End Kid—is unmistakable. It belongs to Ruth...

Dec 26, 2011 — Noël Coward’s play Design for Living was produced for Broadway in 1933, starring Coward, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne. But it started life back in 1921. Coward was on his first impoverished visit to America. He arrived in New York...

Dec 8, 2011 — Sir Alfred Hitchcock once said, “I’m not a heavy eater. I’m just heavy, and I eat.” Hitchcock’s father was a grocer, so we can assume young Alfie grew up knowing his way around food. His films are filled with food...

Oct 4, 2011 — Vilified, censored, banned, denied commercial distribution, and long unavailable, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous film lives more in reputation and rumor than in memory.

Aug 24, 2011 — NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers. Not long into Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine (2007), a melodrama about suffering, salvation, and the dangerously blurred line between belief and madness, the heroine encounters the first of several challenges to her way of...

Jul 8, 2011 — I was scared to death about The Lady Eve. I happen to love pratfalls, but as almost everything I like, other people dislike, and vice versa, my dearest friends and severest critics constantly urged me to cut the pratfalls down...

Jun 20, 2011 — Genres collide in the great Hollywood movies of the mid­fifties cold-war thaw. With the truce in Korea and the red scare on the wane, ambitious directors seemed freer to mix and match and even ponder the new situation. The western...