Last Letter

May 13, 2013 — Delmer Daves’s visually majestic, emotionally charged western finds its drama in the decency of its characters.

Feb 19, 2013 — Elia Kazan’s masterwork is a vivid, tough look at a time and place, and a transcendent human drama.

Jan 22, 2013 — Andrei Tarkovsky’s austere, minimalist, and poetic film was the first major accomplishment in an oeuvre that would become one of Russia’s main contributions to the treasury of world cinema.

Dec 5, 2012 — The following is excerpted from an interview that originally appeared in the February 1, 1981, issue of L’avant-scène: Cinéma. It was conducted by Olivier Eyquem and Jean-Claude Missiaen. Eyquem is a documentalist and former staff member at Positif; he blogs...

Nov 13, 2012 — Moving to Chaucer’s gray-skied England, Pier Paolo Pasolini pushed his trilogy into darker realms.

Oct 30, 2012 — All of them actors? Nearly everyone wears a mask in Roman Polanski’s devilishly clever work of horror.

Jun 25, 2012 — For this Edinburgh-based writer and filmmaker, Hitchcock’s Scottish caper is both fantasy and reality.

May 8, 2012 — To start on a personal note: I wrote a book about La haine that came out in November 2005, just as the Paris suburbs (banlieues) erupted in an unprecedented wave of violence. Every night, as in the Bob Marley song we...

Mar 27, 2012 — Good wartime propaganda films are as rare as good wars. Noël Coward and David Lean’s In Which We Serve, which had its premiere in Great Britain in September 1942, when the nation was entering the fourth year of hostilities with...

Mar 27, 2012 — The mysterious letter was signed “Joe.” David Lean’s lawyer had sent me a batch of old correspondence. Struggling with a biography of Lean, I was desperate for any leads, and this one seemed worth following up. But how does one...