Star

Sep 23, 2011 — Performances Lillian Gish once said, “I’ve never been in style, so I can never go out of style.” The silent-screen legend was being modest, but she was clearly on to something—something that Charles Laughton grasped when he cast her as...

Sep 19, 2011 — When Claude Chabrol’s first film, Le beau Serge, had its premiere at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival (out of competition), a fellow critic at Cahiers du cinéma, François Truffaut, wrote: “Technically, the film is as masterly as if Chabrol had...

Sep 7, 2011 — The Dryden Theatre—the exhibition space of the renowned George Eastman House film archive in Rochester, New York—is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary this year. And its recently hired programmer: Lori Donnelly, is thrilled to be there for the occasion. “It’s a...

Aug 31, 2011 — A man and a woman are married in a small town. The wedding procession follows them to a canal barge, of which he is the master. His crew, an old salt and a young boy, await them there. The couple...

Aug 31, 2011 — Let there be no trouble, no pranks . . . Do you realize the enormity of our moral responsibility? —Headmaster in Zéro de conduite There is nothing in the history of movies that mirrors or matches the achievement of Jean...

Aug 31, 2011 — City symphony or spa burlesque? Polemic or caprice? From the outset, even in his manifesto lecture “Towards a Social Cinema,” delivered to the Groupement des Spectateurs d’Avant-Garde at Paris’s Le Vieux-Colombier before what was only the second public screening of À propos...

Aug 30, 2011 — “It is much less a film than it is myself,” Jean Cocteau wrote to a friend at the time he was making Orpheus (1950), “a kind of projection of the things that are important to me.” As with many of...

Aug 9, 2011 — Gillo Pontecorvo’s incendiary epic commemorates the popular uprising that had succeeded in ousting the French from Algeria in July 1962.

Jul 28, 2011 — We’re pleased to announce that Janus Films has picked up the North American rights to Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre, which, as you may have heard, premiered to much acclaim in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI (the...

Jul 21, 2011 — Performances When people talk about Mike Leigh’s Naked, the conversation is inevitably focused on David Thewlis’s nerve-shredding, tour de force central performance as the callous drifter Johnny, who slices through life like a straight razor. Yet consider how impossible his...