The Picture Show Man

Dec 3, 2021 — Deep Dives A baby lies in a crib and drinks from a bottle of water; a little girl, her mother, and her teddy bears enjoy a tea party; a smiling father helps his children out of the car; couples court...

Jul 13, 2021 — Miles: I just sold a building on the Lower East Side and tripled my money Molly: There’s a lot of that happening these days. Released the year before Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), Working Girls, a film about sex work, is a sharper by far...

Nov 25, 2020 — “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a fatal abyss.” Wanda in The White Sheik (1952) I have a vivid memory from the first film-studies class I enrolled in, a class on Italian neorealism, where the weekly...

Sep 1, 2020 — It’s not impossible to be a lazy, shrug-it-off filmmaker, just as it isn’t to be a lazy painter or novelist, or, more to the point, a lazy comic artist, drawing each picture merely once and then moving on. (You could...

Oct 24, 2019 — With deafening footfalls and an earsplitting roar, Gojira, known in the West as Godzilla, first thundered into Japan’s movie houses on November 3, 1954. Six and a half decades later, the monster presides over an international entertainment franchise, having starred...

Mar 27, 2012 — Coward and Lean? It may not sound as natural as Launder and Gilliat or Powell and Pressburger, perhaps because we don’t instinctively think of Noël Coward as a filmmaker or of David Lean as part of a team. But they...

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 22, 2011 — 12 Angry Men (1957), the first feature film directed by the legendary Sidney Lumet, is a Hollywood classic that, ironically, helped to define an era of filmmaking grounded in the gritty realism and frenetic energy of urban New York. A...

Jan 6, 2009 — Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning film is not just an epic but also a small film, one in which, somehow or other, the scope of David Lean has been enriched with the vision of Ozu.

Oct 30, 2024 — The filmmaker struggled to emerge from the long shadow of one of the world’s most famous artists.