To Be and to Have

Nov 25, 2013 — He massages, he gambles, and he’s great with a blade. Who is this blind swordsman, anyway?

Sep 30, 2013 — The author describes his interactions with the great Polish filmmaker.

Jul 9, 2007 — The names Hiroshi Teshigahara, Kobo Abe, and Toru Takemitsu loom large among Japanese intellectuals of the late twentieth century. Each in his own right was an artist of peculiar genius, each resisting easy classification in conventional categories: Teshigahara as filmmaker,...

Apr 23, 2007 — Louis Malle’s documentary work adopts certain tenets of cinéma direct—improvisation, minimal crew, the refusal to organize reality—and applies them to a consistently class-conscious, outsider perspective.

Jun 2, 1998 — In Ray Johnson’s documentary The Making of “A Night to Remember”, Walter Lord says that when he wrote his 1955 book on the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, there was no mass interest in the topic; nothing had been written...

Jun 3, 1991 — Jean Marais on the set of Beauty and the Beast An excerpt from Cocteau: A Biography (1970) by Francis Steegmuller Beauty and the Beast, the first film of Cocteau’s own since The Blood of a Poet, and his finest poem since...

Oct 22, 2026 — This month’s roundup spotlights new titles on Murnau, Welles, Capra, Zulawski, and Richard Fleischer as well as forthcoming books from Matías Piñeiro and Tilda Swinton.

Sep 29, 2026 — The body-swap mystery stumped more than a few viewers in Cannes, but it seems to have found its footing in New York.

Aug 21, 2026 — Touring David Lynch’s LA, listening to screenwriter Samy Burch, and deciphering Adam Curtis.

Aug 11, 2026 — Set in 1930s French West Africa, Bertrand Tavernier’s hard-to-classify adaptation of the Jim Thompson novel Pop. 1280 offers an apocalyptic vision of a society in which institutions have abdicated their moral authority.