The Letter

Jan 18, 2012 — Poto and Cabengo: Three-Part Harmony Jean-Pierre Gorin’s three Southern California movies are so militantly unclassifiable that terms like documentary or essay film seem as hopelessly out of sync with the recalcitrant and frequently exhilarating works themselves as a Marxist harangue in...

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...

Sep 15, 2008 — Max Ophuls’s 1952 comedy celebrates existence by presenting a world full of unresolvable contradictions.

Sep 13, 2004 — Fifteen years ago I received a letter from a young film director in Texas, who enclosed a tape of his first film, with the unlikely title It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books. It might as well have...

Sep 10, 2024 — A commanding presence on the stage and on movie and television screens, Jones could perform wonders with that voice.

Nov 7, 2023 — By the end of the 1970s, everything had changed for Jackie Chan. He had cowritten, directed, and starred in The Fearless Hyena, which became the top-grossing Hong Kong film of 1979. His next project, The Young Master, would top that...

Jul 29, 2021 — As André Bazin put it, Marker created “a new and modern reality based as much on language and words as on the power of the image.”

Aug 9, 2018 — The Academy’s announced three changes it hopes will ward off encroaching irrelevance.

Jun 21, 2018 — The American philosopher was an early proponent of cinema as a subject worthy of serious study.

Apr 27, 2009 — Stephen Frears’s gangland drama subverts its genre by removing its villains to an alternate mythic universe, that of the western, as its protagonists traverse the roads that snake through Spain’s arid hills and plains.