The Theme

Dec 5, 2012 — The following is excerpted from an interview that originally appeared in the February 1, 1981, issue of L’avant-scène: Cinéma. It was conducted by Olivier Eyquem and Jean-Claude Missiaen. Eyquem is a documentalist and former staff member at Positif; he blogs...

Sep 18, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s theatrical spectacle set in early nineteenth-century Paris is an operatic work about passion and artifice.

Sep 4, 2012 — Umberto D. is perhaps the most astringent film ever made about a poor old man and his dog. Critics today tend to like the astringent parts: the long, deliberately undramatic sequences full of mundane activity (such as a housemaid’s morning...

Jun 25, 2012 — For this Edinburgh-based writer and filmmaker, Hitchcock’s Scottish caper is both fantasy and reality.

Apr 28, 2011 — When Criterion producer Susan Arosteguy was at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, last month, she met local cooking teacher and cinephile Ron Deutsch in line for a screening. They got to chatting, and Ron told Susan...

Feb 22, 2011 — It wasn’t intended. No one could have predicted it. But Sweet Smell of Success turned out to be a terminus where several movie genres and subgenres converged and curdled, producing a uniquely delicious perfume of everlasting cynicism. Inhale deeply. And...

Oct 22, 2009 — The eighty-one-year-old Ennio Morricone has been composing hypnotic music for film since the early 1960s, for projects ranging from spaghetti westerns (his whistling, woodwindy five-note theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of the most recognizable...

Jul 27, 2009 — We enter Roman Polanski’s harrowing Repulsion as if in the middle of the story, but it’s actually the beginning of the end. Polanski unceremoniously drops us into a beauty salon where a pampered matron takes to task our heroine, a...

Once widely misunderstood, this French master of suspense dealt in misanthropic, black-humored tales and is now recognized to be among the greatest directors of the 1950s.

Nov 19, 2007 — Akira Kurosawa explores criminal machismo in his seventh film, which he felt was his official breakthrough in Japanese cinema.