† This is the Life

Feb 17, 2016 — Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 masterpiece of silent cinema, The Kid, is now available on Blu-ray and DVD. In this film, his feature-length directorial debut, Chaplin stars as his already iconic Tramp character alongside a young Jackie Coogan, who plays the orphan...

Jan 5, 2016 — The late Haskell Wexler wore many hats—he was an independent, impassioned documentarian; a commercial Hollywood cinematographer; a political and social activist; an institutional (even union) contrarian. He was also an exemplar of how to live.

Feb 28, 2014 — The Great Beauty, which is up for best foreign-language film at Sunday’s Academy Awards, feels at times like a glorious throwback to a time when art-house cinema reigned. Feeling nostalgic for that era, when films by the great directors of world...

Jul 29, 2013 — Guillermo del Toro’s historical thriller and supernatural horror film The Devil’s Backbone is clearly the work of a film artist with an immense imagination. But according to the writer-director, it was also inspired by a real-life experience that haunts him...

Dec 11, 2012 — Philip Glass’s experimental operas and symphonic works of the 1960s and ’70s laid the groundwork for his hypnotic Qatsi scores.

Sep 6, 2012 — Repertory PicksStarting this week, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Cinematheque joins forces with the university’s Chazen Museum of Art to cast a spotlight on Italian art. In conjunction with the Chazen’s exhibition Offering of the Angels: Paintings and Tapestries from the...

Jun 6, 2012 — A killer breakfast

Nov 29, 2011 — Elephant Boy: Child’s Play It’s hard to imagine a movie role more perfectly suited to the actor playing it than Toomai in Elephant Boy (1937), the part that made Selar Shaik—known as Sabu—one of the least likely superstars in Western...

May 22, 2011 — We received the sad news that Leonard Kastle, director of The Honeymoon Killers, passed away on Wednesday at his home in Westerlo, NY, at the age of eighty-two. In addition to writing and directing that film, Mr. Kastle was an...

Mar 15, 2011 — Based on Louis Malle’s childhood memories, this period drama traces the wary, prickly friendship between two boys, one of whom is hiding from the Nazis.