Once Is Never

Jan 12, 2016 — In German filmmaker Wim Wenders’s high-strung thriller, adapted from two Patricia Highsmith novels, Dennis Hopper plays sociopathic con man Tom Ripley as a “hopped-up elf from hell” who works his charms on a winsome and guileless Bruno Ganz.

Jan 6, 2015 — Kihachi Okamoto's The Sword of Doom is likely to strike the unalerted viewer as an exercise in absurdist violence, tracking the career of a nihilistic swordsman from his gratuitous murder of a defenseless old man to his final descent into...

Nov 10, 2014 — Monte Hellman’s existential westerns take Beckett to the desert.

Aug 4, 2014 — Rebellious children of the sixties become conflicted consumers of the eighties in Lawrence Kasdan’s elegiac comedy-drama.

Jul 30, 2014 — A friend and longtime scholar of Jacques Demy ruminates on the great director’s career, as well as the port hometown they shared—which would become a magical movie location.

May 14, 2014 — The author recalls his meetings and correspondence with the uncompromisingly independent British director.

Oct 25, 2013 — "I“m not acting,” stage star Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) tells her bemused director after a violent episode with her ghostly muse in Opening Night. That’s a loaded claim to be making in a movie that so conclusively smudges the line...

Sep 4, 2013 — Only Ernst Lubitsch got the great comedian to be as funny on the big screen as he was on the radio.

Oct 30, 2012 — All of them actors? Nearly everyone wears a mask in Roman Polanski’s devilishly clever work of horror.

Oct 25, 2011 — It’s not a movie about how things were; it’s a movie about how things are remembered.