This Is Not a Film

This most unpredictable of filmmakers enriched cinema over a nearly forty-year career that took him from the peripheries of the French New Wave to the vanguard of American moviemaking.

Dec 7, 2010 — In 1981, it seemed to me that a new era of fantastic cinema was upon us.

Oct 29, 2009 — In the spirit of the season, we asked a select coven of horror mavens (including a couple of our own) to write about their favorite Criterion scarefests. Chuck StephensEquinox: The Eyebrows of Mr. Asmodeus There are myriad ways into Equinox,...

Jun 15, 2009 — With the arrival of this film, cinema catapulted to the front line of a cultural advance guard that sought to undermine the intractable mass taste promoted by Hollywood, television, and the Brill Building.

May 11, 2009 — Novelists learn not to expect too much when their books are made into movies. Obviously, great fiction has been turned into great cinema, but the dents and scrapes that so many classics have sustained on the rocky road from the...

Jun 30, 2008 — The novelist Mishima Yukio stepped behind the camera to adapt his own short story, which depicts the act of seppuku as a thing of beauty.

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,...

May 21, 2007 — In January 1948, British film producer Sir Alexander Korda, head of British-Lion and London Film Productions, commissioned novelist Graham Greene to write and research “an original postwar continental story to be based on either or both of the following territories:...

Aug 20, 2001 — Carl Dreyer’s modern tragedy eschews melodrama, striking a balance between suffering and triviality.

Feb 11, 1990 — Bob Rafelson’s ultimate road movie is a relaxed masterpiece, a film of laid-back innovation that hasn’t aged one iota since its original release.