Straight Time

May 21, 2007 — “The Harry Lime Theme” has never gone out of print since its release, and it’s been recorded by over four hundred artists, from the Beatles to Guy Lombardo.

Jan 15, 2016 — The filmmaker and cinematographer had a lifelong commitment to the camera and how it could be used to foster dialogue and action.

Aug 13, 2018 — From Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers to Kazuo Hasegawa in An Actor’s Revenge, performers who multitask as several characters in a single film tap into the essential uncanniness of cinema itself.

May 25, 2010 — In the films of Stan Brakhage, the viewer’s role must be reimagined: from a passive receiver to one who meets the film halfway, actively plumbing the depths of its imagery and the various themes and ideas suggested by its subject...

Apr 30, 2009 — The following article, based on an interview with Nagisa Oshima conducted by Katsue Tomiyama in April 1983, first appeared, in slightly longer form, in the Japanese magazine Image Forum. Tomiyama is a film producer and cofounder of Image Forum, and...

Feb 25, 2020 — In these times of Trumpidation, thirty years after its auspicious release, Paris Is Burning seems even more relevant than it did in early 1991, when I wrote the following for Black Film Review about Jennie Livingston’s phenomenal documentary on New...

Aug 3, 2026 — The American Cinematheque presents six of the eleven films Douglas Sirk and cinematographer Russell Metty made between 1952 and 1959.

Dec 27, 2019 — This week’s highlights stretch from the earliest animated shorts through the best of 1929 and 2019 to Godard’s next project.

Jan 19, 2009 — In 1929, a fifty-one-year-old Congregationalist pastor named Lloyd C. Douglas published his first novel. It was a ramshackle sort of book, at its core an undiluted Christian sermon on the life-transforming power of charitable works. But it was a sermon...

Nov 12, 2024 — Innovative metafictions and fresh readings of classic novels arrive along with books on Robert Kramer, Terrence Malick, and Nora Ephron.