The Watch

Jan 3, 2013 — Repertory PicksBefore he became a Hollywood titan, redefining the contemporary superhero film with his Batman trilogy and creating one of the biggest-budget head trip movies of all time with Inception, Christopher Nolan was an idiosyncratic auteur with limited resources, relying...

Dec 6, 2012 — Repertory PicksSeattle’s Northwest Film Forum is offering a Stan Brakhage showcase tonight. The avant-garde legend’s widow, Marilyn Brakhage, and preservationist Mark Toscano will appear in person to accompany a program of four 16 mm films in Academy Film Archive restorations....

Jul 19, 2012 — Repertory PicksThe programmers of St. Louis’s fourth annual Classic French Film Festival series, copresented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series, have veered a bit from the usual path by including Chris Marker’s idiosyncratic travelogue Sans soleil...

Apr 17, 2012 — Maybe it is something to do with the sensual seductiveness of cinema: as new-millennium Americans, we care nothing for Japa­nese poetry, little for Japanese painting and fiction, and certainly too much for Japanese cartoons, and yet Yasujiro Ozu, the least...

Apr 5, 2012 — Repertory Picks The neorealist roots of Michelangelo Antonioni’s art are on full display this weekend at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image. The series Antonioni Documentaries is the culmination of a string of events in New York over the...

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...

Feb 28, 2012 — In the long history of stage-to-screen translations, there’s never been anything quite like Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), an astonishing hybrid blurring the boundaries between theater and film, rehearsal and performance, actor and character. The production began in...

Nov 15, 2011 — The thematic ideas and inspirations that sparked Three Colors: Blue (1993), though typically ambitious in scope, seem sketchy when compared to the intense experience of watching this exquisite film. We know that Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy corresponds to the...

Jul 15, 2011 — Cinephiles, man your battle stations: Abel Gance’s legendary silent behemoth Napoleon, which hasn’t been shown theatrically in the U.S. with live accompaniment for nearly thirty years, will be presented by the 2012 San Francisco Silent Film Festival in four special...

May 3, 2011 — Ingmar Bergman’s exquisite carnal comedy turns a set of boudoir farce conventions into lyrical poetry.