Life

Jan 25, 2016 — Last week, we were saddened to learn of the passing, at the age of eighty-four, of the beloved Italian writer and director Ettore Scola. The filmmaker was a luminary of Italian cinema for more than half a century, and his...

Jan 21, 2016 — Next week, the Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, will kick off Agnès Varda: (Self)-Portraits, Facts and Fiction, a monthlong series celebrating the pioneering French director’s body of work.

Jan 21, 2016 — In Gilda, Charles Vidor’s “violent, sexual, chaotic” noir, the director focused on Rita Hayworth’s skills as an actor and a dancer, eliciting a performance that became iconic in its own right and made her an international superstar.

Jan 19, 2016 — Inside Llewyn Davis takes its protagonist on a Hero’s Journey of characteristically Coen-esque proportions—a voyage at turns serious and comic, and framed by an exquisitely curated selection of folk melodies.

Jan 15, 2016 — The filmmaker and cinematographer had a lifelong commitment to the camera and how it could be used to foster dialogue and action.

Jan 14, 2016 — For the lead role of Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend, a melancholy neonoir that fused Wenders’s New German sensibility with classic Hollywood drama, the director needed an actor who could convey menace with complexity. Wenders had his...

Jan 13, 2016 — In Bitter Rice, Giuseppe De Santis focused his lens on the world of Italy’s female rice workers, for a story that’s part social commentary, part pulp melodrama—and introduced the world to a dazzling young actress named Silvana Mangano.

Jan 12, 2016 — In German filmmaker Wim Wenders’s high-strung thriller, adapted from two Patricia Highsmith novels, Dennis Hopper plays sociopathic con man Tom Ripley as a “hopped-up elf from hell” who works his charms on a winsome and guileless Bruno Ganz.

Jan 7, 2016 — At the gala for the New York Film Critics Circle’s 2016 awards dinner Criterion president Peter Becker accepted an award on behalf of his father, Criterion cofounder William Becker. His remarks are reproduced here.

Jan 5, 2016 — The late Haskell Wexler wore many hats—he was an independent, impassioned documentarian; a commercial Hollywood cinematographer; a political and social activist; an institutional (even union) contrarian. He was also an exemplar of how to live.