A Balance

Aug 14, 2020 — Appreciations of Kathleen Collins and Vittorio De Sica and interviews with James Mangold, Orson Welles, and Billy Wilder are among this week’s highlights.

Jun 15, 2020 — The hugely popular and prolific Italian actor Alberto Sordi relished playing rogues, characters riddled with foibles and weaknesses. In an interview with Positif’s Jean A. Gili in 1999, he revealed that his aim was to depict in a comic register...

May 27, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so commonplace that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. Movies, however, reveal this action as more than just the original mode of getting from here to...

May 22, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so common that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. But when this action appears in a movie, it is revealed as more than the original mode...

Jan 20, 2020 — In celebration of Federico Fellini’s 100th birthday, the director of The Farewell talks about the deeply moving final scene of Nights of Cabiria and its mixture of pain and hope.

Dec 12, 2019 — Almost from the moment it arrived on screens in early 2006, Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy was celebrated as a new milestone for American cinema, even an expression of independent filmmaking’s delayed arrival at maturity. In relating its deceptively simple tale...

Sep 13, 2019 — With The Cloud-Capped Star, Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak reinvented the melodrama. The story of a refugee family’s increasing dependence on self-sacrificing eldest daughter Neeta (Supriya Choudhury), the 1960 film makes innovative use of an array of striking techniques—including elliptical editing,...

Jun 20, 2019 — When French auteur Bruno Dumont emerged on the film-festival circuit at the end of the 1990s with his debut feature, La vie de Jésus, and his Cannes-award-winning international breakthrough L’humanité, he immediately polarized audiences with his pitiless vision of human...

Jun 4, 2019 — The great Hollywood portrait photographs are like close-ups that never end. Cinema is an art of faces, and the chance to gaze at them, to get lost in them, may be the deepest thrill movies offer. In the darkness of...

Mar 12, 2019 — By dint of perseverance, Harold Lloyd, the modest son of Burchard, Nebraska, became the prince of Hollywood, California, where he lived the Horatio Alger dream. His life and his memorable films alike echo Alger’s theme of young men who apply...