Strictly Business

Oct 5, 2016 — Rock critic Robert Christgau examines the evocative use of three early Leonard Cohen songs in Robert Altman’s brilliant revisionist western.

Jun 29, 2016 — In this essay, first published in Grand Street in 1994, Dr. Strangelove coscreenwriter Terry Southern offers a lively behind-the-scenes look at the film’s production.

Nov 11, 2013 — A boldly silent film in the talkie era, Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece has a grace that has never been equaled.

Jan 8, 2013 — The two movies that opened the door to “youth culture” in Hollywood, The Graduate and Easy Rider, were milestones, to be sure. But can it really be said that they were milestones in the art of cinema? “I think The...

Jun 21, 2011 — Chains: Bound for Glory Film history is replete with artists embraced by critics but misunderstood by the public. For Italian filmmaker Raffaello Matarazzo, it was the opposite. After working for almost two decades as a midlevel studio director of pictures...

Apr 25, 2011 — Brian De Palma brought hip, freewheeling funkiness to the American film renaissance of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Wised-up, cinema-savvy audiences across the country knew to seek out his movies for their scruffy wit, showmanship, and aesthetic innovation, not...

Aug 13, 2010 — The Docks of New York When John Grierson, the Scotsman whose absolute devotion to realism on film—he coined the word documentary and created the National Film Board of Canada—was asked how he’d enjoyed a screening of a now-lost Josef von Sternberg...

Jul 27, 2009 — We enter Roman Polanski’s harrowing Repulsion as if in the middle of the story, but it’s actually the beginning of the end. Polanski unceremoniously drops us into a beauty salon where a pampered matron takes to task our heroine, a...

May 20, 2009 — The title alone screams incongruity. Shohei Imamura’s 1961 black-and-white caper movie Pigs and Battleships bursts with the confusion and exuberance of a cross-cultural encounter. In its lively portrayal of enthusiastic Japanese locals welcoming the U.S. Navy on R&R to the...

Sep 29, 2003 — Fassbinder had long dreamed of a “German Hollywood film.” He sought not only success with the audience, but also professionalism. The auteur film in its purest form is an attempt to abolish the division of labor: the filmmaker represents in...