The Last Deal

Apr 17, 2018 — “Almost every Steven Spielberg movie has its antecedent in a TV show, a movie serial or a comic book,” wrote Michael Sragow when he spoke with Spielberg for Rolling Stone in 1981. “The one he feels [Raiders of the Lost...

Dec 14, 2017 — Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama is a sixty-two film series now running at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York through January 7. “Sam Fuller famously defined cinema as ‘emotion,’ and just about every variety of it may be...

Oct 3, 2017 — “American Gods star Pablo Schreiber will play astronaut Jim Lovell in Damien Chazelle’s moon-mission movie First Man,” reports Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro. In March, D’Alessandro noted that the story, based on James R. Hansen’s 2005 book, “follows NASA’s mission to land...

Jun 23, 2008 — The year 1950 marked a turning point in Anthony Mann’s career, the moment when he passed from the series of brilliant film-noir B movies that had established him to the westerns that made him a major figure. Mann released three...

Oct 17, 2023 — I. “Morbid Cinema” On October 10, 1962, there appeared a brief paragraph from the Associated Press: “Tod Browning, eighty-two, who directed scores of movies between 1917 and 1939, is dead. He succumbed Saturday after an illness, and no funeral plans...

Jan 13, 2022 — Yes, he opened doors, but he also brought a singular presence to American cinema.

Jun 5, 2018 — Both award-winning directors are committing to television projects even as they carry on making feature films.

Mar 14, 2018 — Tilda Swinton will star in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s next feature, reports Jordan Raup at the Film Stage. “Titled Memoria, it will mark the Palme d’Or-winning director’s first film shot outside Thailand, with a 2019 production planned in Colombia. ‘During the 70s...

Nov 17, 2017 — G rasshopper Film has posted Ted Fendt’s essay on Moses and Aaron (1974), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s adaptation of Arnold Schoenberg’s unfinished opera: “Straub and Huillet’s brilliance—and a fundamental aspect of their method of adaptation—is to allow the contradictions...

Oct 5, 2017 — For kicks, I’m opening this one with something I wrote myself back in February, just hours after seeing the film at the Berlinale: “Aki Kaurismäki’s uneven but irresistibly amusing The Other Side of Hope, dedicated to the late film historian...