The One That Got Away

Apr 23, 2021 — This week we’re reading A. S. Hamrah on the contenders for this year’s Oscars and Ben Hecht on the state of Hollywood in 1938.

Oct 13, 2020 — Some critics are amused, others aren’t, but everyone agrees that Michelle Pfeiffer is outstanding.

Dec 20, 2019 — The following account was scratched together in August 1990, when Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World was still taking shape in the editing room. Apart from a basic rinse of copy editing, I’m offering it up essentially as is,...

Aug 21, 2019 — One Scene One of my absolute favorite quotes from Douglas Sirk—and he has a million of ’em—was made in reference to Magnificent Obsession. “It is a combination of kitsch and craziness and trashiness,” he said (this isn’t the quote quite...

Apr 24, 2019 — American cinema has lost one of its most visionary artists.

Aug 1, 2017 — From Pittsburgh, where he’s currently working on Where’d You Go, Bernadette? with Cate Blanchett and Kristen Wiig, Richard Linklater—seen above directing Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise way back in 1995—called into the Television Critics Association on Sunday,...

Jan 8, 2016 — In March of 1967, Bosley Crowther, then the film critic for the New York Times, wrote about Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, penning what is now considered one of his most famously wrong-headed reviews.

Dec 16, 2014 — The prolific and popular Keisuke Kinoshita made his fascinating first movies at a time of great difficulty and censorship, yet their spirit and brilliance shine through.

Apr 25, 2012 — Pearls of the Deep: Alumni AssociationIn the mid-1960s, there was a brief window during which a remarkable cinema of ideas and visual experimentation flourished in Communist Czechoslovakia. This fecund period lasted approximately five years, from 1963 to 1968, when it...

Jul 27, 2010 — Americans got The Secret of the Grain. In France, they got La graine et le mulet (The Grain and the Mullet)—basically, “Couscous and Fish.” Depending on whose table you eat dinner at, the French title can seem as elemental as...