Filmmaker

Jun 19, 2006 — Decades after its backyard birth, Jack Woods’s DIY horror movie has forged a model of inspiration for succeeding generations of effects artists and low-budget filmmakers.

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...

Jan 8, 1996 — Dodes’ka-den was made at a low point in Akira Kurosawa’s long career-perhaps the lowest that the director has ever known. In the preface of the filmmaker’s autobiography, critic and translator Audie Bock reports that Kurosawa’s commercial prospects became bleak in...

Nov 13, 1991 — Richard Lester’s Help! was the first of a new kind of rock-and-roll movie which altered the shape, face, and form of rock music. Before Help!, most of the rock-and-roll genre movies were simple, self contained films conceived in the narrowest...

Both veteran filmmakers and new voices took cinema into exciting territory as the end of the millennium approached.

The actor, writer, and director shares what makes Michael Haneke and Robert Bresson such exceptional filmmakers, praises the cinematography of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, and talks about the power of representation in Do the Right Thing and El Norte.

This native of Houston, Texas, has influenced countless young independent filmmakers with his authentic portraits of adolescence and romantic discovery.

The writer, director, and performer talks about how All That Jazz inspired the stylistic freedom of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, shares a moving story about After Life, and praises the versatility of filmmakers like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Sidney...

The writer and director returns to the Criterion Closet, where he talks about the infectious energy of Night and the City, shares why Beau travail and Cold Water were transformative works for independent filmmakers in the 1990s, and praises the...

The actor and director praises Black God, White Devil as one of the most important Brazilian films ever made, talks about the complex humanity of Il Posto, and reflects on why Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are his favorite filmmakers.