The Brazilwood Man

Mar 28, 2014 — By the time he made The Freshman in 1925, Harold Lloyd was already a superstar. His comedies, which combined jaw-dropping derring-do with loveable characters, were routinely among their years’ top box-office attractions. When Lloyd announced he was working on a...

Sep 24, 2013 — Marketed as a movie of volcanic passion, Roberto Rossellini’s first film with Ingrid Bergman is rather a pragmatic take on the negotiations of matrimony.

Sep 16, 2013 — Ingmar Bergman plumbs the depths of a fractured family and gives Ingrid Bergman a shocking star role.

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

Sep 25, 2012 — No mere jigsaw movie, David Fincher’s thriller is also a nuanced character study, a satire of corporate culture, and a film about filmmaking.

Oct 24, 2011 — “For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis,” says the narrator of Don DeLillo’s novel The Names. “It daunted me, that somber rock. I preferred to wander in the modern city, imperfect, blaring. The weight and moment of...

Jul 12, 2011 — Heeeere’s Johnny, the desperate, destructive prophet-of-the-apocalypse protagonist of Mike Leigh’s brilliantly corrosive Naked (1993), a sexually explicit update to a long line of British films, plays, and novels about angry young men. Johnny might be mistaken for a mere misanthrope,...

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 26, 2011 — At once prestigious literary adaptation and slap­stick buddy flick, this is something like a lowbrow art film, an egghead monster movie, a hilarious paean to reckless indulgence, and perhaps the most widely released midnight movie ever made.

Jan 25, 2011 —  Sapphire: Inner City Given his strikingly eclectic body of work, it’s not surprising that Basil Dearden has never become a household name—he’s too hard to pin down. Moving effortlessly among comedies, melodramas, and thrillers, over a thirty-five-film, nearly thirty-year career,...