Toyer

Apr 19, 2019 — Performances No other comedian could milk a pause for a laugh quite the way Jack Benny could on his radio program, which lasted from 1932 to 1955 and turned him into an American institution. (He also did a TV show...

Mar 20, 2019 — Anatomy of a Gag Harold Lloyd may not have had the melancholy disposition of his silent-clown competitors Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, but he knew how to introduce elements of menace and peril into his comedies in a way that...

Mar 15, 2019 — More than thirty years after his death, there seems no shortage of discoveries left to be made about the artistic life of Orson Welles. This weekend, fans are in for a treat as a new documentary about the filmmaker’s little-known...

Feb 18, 2019 — The Swiss actor will be remembered for a range of characters spanning from heaven to hell.

Jan 23, 2019 — Checking in on how the nominees are currently faring with critics and awards prognosticators.

Jan 15, 2019 — In Notorious (1946), love assumes different shapes and presentations—as a wound, a weapon, a promise, a curse. For Ingrid Bergman as the lusciously complex and raw-nerved Alicia Huberman, it’s all these things. As the film begins, Alicia is on the...

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...

Dec 3, 2018 — True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 paean to American eccentricity and ordinariness, called to me from the shelves of a video store in Austin, Texas. Subtitled “A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas,” True Stories is not “true”...

Nov 18, 2018 — Ingmar Bergman scholar Peter Cowie explores how the great actor’s authoritative screen presence allowed him to embody the director’s fears and ideals.

Sep 17, 2018 — Once called “the great directorial genius of Hollywood” by Carole Lombard, Gregory La Cava struck comedy gold with this mix of madcap high jinks, irresistible romance, and social commentary.