The Breath

Jul 15, 2017 — “The film’s tag line was ‘They share the same body . . . but hate each other’s guts!’ I was told that the timing was a coincidence, but even before the film began it was clear that this was a...

May 5, 2017 — Did You See This? To celebrate the centennial birthday of iconic French actor Danielle Darrieux, Dan Callahan has written an ode to her breathtaking work in the films of Max Ophuls and Jacques Demy. Of her performance in The Earrings...

Jul 7, 2016 — In honor of the director, we look back at his quintessentially American narratives.

Feb 14, 2012 — For nearly three decades, Hideo Gosha (1929–1992) made some of the most explosive, artful, and original films in Japanese cinema. Along the way, he also became one of his country’s most established and acclaimed filmmakers. But his reputation in the...

Dec 6, 2011 — The Lady Vanishes (1938) is the film that best exemplifies Alfred Htchcock’s often-asserted desire to offer audiences not a slice of life but a slice of cake. Even Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, in their pioneering study of Hitchcock, for...

May 16, 2011 — Among the most enduringly popular motives for murder, in films as in life, is the desire to remove an impediment to happiness—to get somebody, once and for all, out of the way. In life, of course, the goal of freeing...

Mar 10, 2010 — Breathless returns to the big screen this spring. Fifty years after the film’s release in France, Rialto Pictures has acquired the U.S. rights to a new 35 mm print of Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave groundbreaker, which showed at this year’s...

Oct 6, 2008 — It is pretty much a convention of the hard-boiled gangster picture that most, if not all, of the principal characters wind up dead by the final shot. So it ought not constitute a “spoiler” to note that Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le...

This explosion of vibrant, innovative, and highly self-conscious films from France in the late 1950s and early 1960s changed the game.

Jul 23, 2007 — It’s hard to think of an artist who better exemplifies the obscuring ebb and flow of film history than Raymond Bernard.