The Last Laugh

Sep 16, 2014 — The following interview is from filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s 1997 book Lynch on Lynch. The interviews in the book were conducted by Rodley between January 1993 and December 1996. Eraserhead took five years to complete. You must have been...

Sep 18, 2013 — This chapter about director Richard Linklater’s beginnings, from the 1996 book Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of American Independent Cinema, is by the former producer’s representative, creator and host of IFC’s Split Screen, and...

Jun 21, 2012 — Austin film programmer Jesse Trussell tells us about what goes into curating this long-running series.

May 23, 2012 — Iranian master director Abbas Kiarostami voyaged to Italy to make a film that questions love, relationships, and Western art cinema.

Jun 22, 2011 — Theresa Russell is attracted to the very things that repel most actors. In 1976’s The Last Tycoon, her first movie (and Elia Kazan’s last), she is unafraid of seeming to do very little. Young actresses like to show you they...

May 26, 2011 — Last month, a new art-house theater opened here in Austin, the Violet Crown Cinema. (Our city has several pet names, and one of them is the City of the Violet Crown. Why it’s called that has been completely lost to...

Mar 24, 2011 — Costumer Lindy Hemming began her decades-long collaboration with Mike Leigh at London’s Hampstead Theater Club, where the director, with his now legendary method of extended improvisation, was guiding his company toward what would become, in April 1977, Abigail’s Party. “At...

Feb 2, 2011 — These tributes first appeared in the winter 2010 issue of Brick, a literary journal based in Toronto. They are posted here by permission of the authors. The photographs appear courtesy of Colleen Murphy.   Colleen Murphy After we decided to...

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

Nov 18, 2010 — In Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, terror and tenderness grapple with each other as profoundly as the words HATE and LOVE when they’re tattooed, one per hand, across the knuckles of the sadistic preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum)....