Life Is Beautiful

Feb 1, 2018 — The Tracking Board’s Jeff Sneider hears from “multiple sources” that Clint Eastwood—seen above in Gran Torino (2008)—is “circling” The Mule, a project based on Sam Dolnick’s 2014 article for the New York Times Magazine about Leo Sharp, a ninety-year-old courier...

Dec 19, 2017 — While he was in town with Call Me by Your Name at the New York Film Festival in October, Luca Guadagnino stopped by our office to talk about inspirations, style, and dancing.

Nov 21, 2017 — Ernst Lubitsch’s “world is defined by time as much as place,” writes Daniel Witkin in the latest entry in Reverse Shot’s symposium on time. “Anachronistically straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, his characters embody unfashionable virtues of discretion and tact...

Oct 4, 2017 — “The strength of women left alone to fend for themselves is the communal focus of actor and director Xavier Beauvois’s The Guardians,” writes Notebook editor Daniel Kasman, introducing his interview with the director. “After directing Of Gods and Men (2010),...

Aug 31, 2017 — Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, premiering in Competition in Venice and screening as a Special Presentation in Toronto, is a “ravishing, eccentric auteur’s imagining, spilling artistry, empathy and sensuality from every open pore, [offering] more straight-up movie for...

May 20, 2017 — “To fans of the mononymous Barbara—the delicate-voiced, emotionally acute French chanteuse adored by everyone from Jacques Brel to François Mitterand—Mathieu Amalric’s mega-meta, dreamily blurred biopic-within-a-film may seem a bemusing tribute to a national icon,” writes Guy Lodge at the top...

Jul 25, 2016 — In his masterful reimagining of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, Terrence Malick meditates on the nature of beauty and America’s path from innocence to experience.

Aug 13, 2015 — The films Agnès Varda made while living on the West Coast of the United States are some of the most searching and challenging of her stellar career.

Mar 11, 2015 — More than thirty years after his death in 1977, Roberto Rossellini is remembered by your average film buff as the father of Italian neo­realism (Rome, Open City, 1945; Paisan, 1946; Germany Year Zero, 1948) and of actress and model Isabella...

Oct 2, 2014 — The following is a chapter on The Innocents from cinematographer Freddie Francis’s memoir, The Straight Story from “Moby Dick” to “Glory.” It is reproduced here courtesy of Scarecrow Press. The last picture I worked on as a cinematographer in my...