The American Friend

Oct 9, 2020 — In the summer of 2020, I spoke with Philippe Garnier about his book Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, available for the first time in English from Eddie Muller’s Black Pool Productions. The book introduces a rogues’...

Aug 24, 2020 — In memory of D. A. Pennebaker (1925–2019) 1. The great documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker was motivated to shoot by curiosity. He loved music and friendship, and he had an understanding that everything he filmed recorded histories both personal and...

Nov 26, 2019 — Bette Davis gets the first laugh in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), and a little over two hours later, she gets the last laugh too. The film opens at the dinner for something called the Sarah Siddons Award...

Oct 22, 2019 — Muhammad Ali was thirty-two years old when he arrived in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974 to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. Thirty-two is not prohibitively old for a boxer in the heavyweight division. (As I type, the most...

Sep 17, 2019 — Fusing the melodrama of Douglas Sirk and the ballyhoo of William Castle, John Waters’ sixth feature, Polyester (1981), was a departure from the scrofulous 16 mm mode of production he had made his cult name plying to midnight-movie crowds in...

Sep 2, 2019 — Dark Passages Thieves’ Highway A hay cart trundles through a sunny field above Fresno, California, in the opening shot of Thieves’ Highway. This is not an image you expect to see in film noir, which most often breeds in cities, alienated from the...

Aug 23, 2019 — After more than three decades in front of the camera, Natasha Lyonne understands a thing or two about what makes on-screen charisma. Previously best known for her early-career performances in films like Slums of Beverly Hills and But I’m a Cheerleader, she has in...

Mar 27, 2019 — Certain films find a way of creeping into your brain because they invite you to explore whole new worlds that continue well beyond their final frames. These movies force you to keep looking for answers to questions posed not just...

Dec 6, 2016 — This elegiac meditation on impermanence showcases Laurie Anderson’s playfully experimental approach to sound and image.

Mar 23, 2016 — We had come to expect Chantal Akerman’s periodic gifts of small and large cinematic gems. Certain of this flow, we were devastated when, all too abruptly, we were forced to think of her latest film, so beautiful, as her last.