Max

Nov 10, 1986 — Max Ophuls’s masterpiece is a transformation of a conventional subject into an avant-garde adventure, and a spectacular stylistic breakthrough in the utilization of wide screen and color.

The writer and director returns to the Criterion Closet, where he talks about a moment from Black Narcissus that’s ingrained in his memory, shares what he loves about Max Ophuls and The Earrings of Madame de . . ., and...

The director and cowriter of Emilia Pérez shares his love for Fritz Lang’s rich visual language, compares Robert Altman’s narratives to “surrealist exquisite-corpse exercises,” and praises the Viennese sensibility of Max Ophuls’s La ronde.

Jean-Pierre Berthomé is a professor emeritus at Rennes University, where, in the 1980s, he created the department of film studies. He contributes regularly to the French film monthly Positif and has written a dozen books, including on Demy, Orson Welles,...

Feb 2, 2011 — These tributes first appeared in the winter 2010 issue of Brick, a literary journal based in Toronto. They are posted here by permission of the authors. The photographs appear courtesy of Colleen Murphy.   Colleen Murphy After we decided to...

Feb 2, 2011 — This essay first appeared in the winter 2010 issue of Brick, a literary journal based in Toronto. It is posted here by permission of the author. Michelangelo said he could sense the figure in the uncut stone; his job was...

Sep 21, 2010 — Warrendale: Man of ActionAllan King was one of cinema’s most acute chroniclers of unadorned reality, but the term documentary seems too puny to describe the intense, passionate stories he contrived to fashion from that reality. King’s early nonfiction features are...

Sep 16, 2010 — I didn’t know quite what to say to Allan King when I met him for the first time in the fall of 2003 at his home offices in downtown Toronto. This was partly out of deference to his reputation as...

Jul 21, 2026 — New restorations of the first three features premiere this weekend, followed by a retrospective next month.

Jul 21, 2026 — Harry Dean Stanton’s Jerry Schue doesn’t get on-screen until a full hour of Ulu Grosbard’s Straight Time (1978) has passed. Unlike Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man, Stanton’s character hasn’t been discussed, chewed over, anticipated, and foreshadowed for...