City Lights

Oct 3, 2019 — By the time Charlie Chaplin was making The Circus, from 1925 into 1928, his production company was a smooth-running organization. Numerous problems plagued the comic during the shoot—scratches on the first month of rushes, a fire that damaged the studio...

Jun 11, 2019 — The problem with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, everyone agrees, is that there is never enough dancing. You have to wait through often silly plots and hit-or-miss comedy for the musical numbers that are the whole point. But the dances...

Nov 23, 2018 — The work of James Agee (1909–1955) remains one of the touchstones of American movie criticism. An extraordinarily versatile writer, he won acclaim as a novelist, a poet, and a screenwriter (his scripts for The African Queen and The Night of the...

Sep 10, 2017 — Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water has won the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice International Film Festival. We’ve been gathering reviews here, and we’ll carry on, too, as the film screens in Toronto throughout the coming week.This year’s...

Aug 22, 2017 — BBC Culture has polled 253 film critics from fifty-two countries to come up with a list of the “100 greatest comedies of all time.” Nicholas Barber argues the case for the film that’s come out on top, Billy Wilder’s Some...

Jul 27, 2017 — Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux is one of the most unsettling comedies of its era and a brilliant showcase for his talent for mixing modes of comedic performance.

Mar 31, 2017 — Like his famously enigmatic landscapes, the performances that anchor Michelangelo Antonioni’s films are integral to his vision of existentialist ennui. Among the most iconic is David Hemmings’s turn in the Italian master’s first English-language feature, Blow-Up, a psychological mystery that...

Feb 27, 2017 — Last month, the world of silent-film history lost one of its most active proponents and preservationists.

Feb 23, 2017 — Repertory PicksThe Indiana University Cinema will screen Roberto Rossellini’s 1946 film Paisan on 35 mm this Saturday as part of its ongoing series of twentieth-century masterworks, City Lights. This unsparing depiction of Italy at the end of World War II...

Mar 3, 2016 — By the time Charlie Chaplin began work on what would be his first feature-length film, in 1919, he had been sneaking up to the longer format for some time.