A Misappropriated Turkey

Aug 31, 2011 — City symphony or spa burlesque? Polemic or caprice? From the outset, even in his manifesto lecture “Towards a Social Cinema,” delivered to the Groupement des Spectateurs d’Avant-Garde at Paris’s Le Vieux-Colombier before what was only the second public screening of À propos...

Dec 13, 2010 — If you’ve read Faber & Faber’s 1998 publication of the Sweet Smell of Success screenplay, you already know from the book’s afterword that director James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted; Walk the Line) studied under the late filmmaker Alexander Mackendrick in the...

Jul 13, 2010 — At the author’s request, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first. Ozu Yasujiro’s personal feelings about Japanese militarism in the 1930s and 1940s are not on record. Perhaps, like most people around him, he accepted the...

Apr 20, 2010 — Ingmar Bergman’s intense, character-based chamber drama Through a Glass Darkly has always seemed like it would make for a great, intimate theater piece. Apparently, Australian playwright Andrew Upton (husband of Cate Blanchett) agrees; he has scripted an adaptation of Bergman’s film...

Feb 19, 2010 — The following transmission is an e-mail from September 2002, which I sent back to Criterion headquarters after spending a night at Hunter S. Thompson’s cabin in Woody Creek, Colorado, recording commentary tracks for the DVD release of Fear and Loathing...

Apr 6, 2009 — Paris is turning into Tativille starting tomorrow, April 8, until August 2, with the Cinémathèque française’s appropriately large-scale retrospective of the famously ambitious French filmmaking legend’s work, “Jacques Tati, deux temps, trois movements.” Curated by Stéphane Goudet and Macha Makeïeff,...

Mar 16, 2009 — Dave Kehr heralds the rediscovery of “the oceanic depth and diversity of Japanese cinema” in recent years, “thanks in no small part to home video,” in a lovely New York Times piece on the latest example of that, Eclipse Series...

Nov 21, 2008 — Filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker (Dont Look Back, Monterey Pop, The War Room) and Chris Hegedus (The War Room, Startup.com), creative partners and husband and wife, offer these favorites. Note: “This list was supposed to be ten in number, but I...

Jun 30, 2008 — The idea of self-fashioning—of deliberately taking the raw materials of one’s body and mind and transforming them into a work of art—has been with us at least since the Renaissance. Yet no one, not even Oscar Wilde, has so rigorously...

Nov 12, 2007 — I’ve always been fascinated by the details of getting places. Bill Becker would often say that the best part of a trip for me was getting there and back—what happened while I was there was less important. Figuring out how...