To Be or Not to Be

Feb 20, 2018 — David Bordwell has revisited The Donovan Affair (1929), “Columbia’s first all-talking picture, and Frank Capra’s as well.” It’s “an unusually fluid early talkie” and studying it teaches us “some things about those transitional years 1928-1932, when filmmakers were figuring out...

Sep 18, 2017 — New York. “The Whole World Sings: International Musicals, a weeklong, thirteen-film series at the Quad, is an education in song-and-dance practices outside the Hollywood one,” writes Nick Pinkerton for 4Columns. “René Clair’s Le Million (1931) [image above] is the earliest...

Sep 5, 2017 — “Apparently the word refers to an actual traumatic state caused by getting lost in a forest,” begins Jonathan Romney in Screen. “However, if the title Woodshock leads you to expect a horror movie about the results of bad acid at...

Sep 26, 2014 — For this week’s festival of free films on Hulu, we put French bombshell Brigitte Bardot in the spotlight. The gorgeous actor, singer, and model burst onto the scene with Roger Vadim’s scandalous 1956 romp And God Created Woman, and was...

Mar 11, 2014 — Presenting  five poor, black and white North Carolina preteens as they awaken to love and death, George Washington (2000) tells a common adolescent story, yet the film is distinguished by the poetic, ruminative style of its twenty-five-year-old director, David Gordon...

May 9, 2012 — The paradox of the biopic is that the need to give fictional characters the kind of messy, defining behavior that makes them ring true—makes them, in the vocabulary of development, “relatable”—is usually overlooked when an actual life is condensed into...

Jun 29, 2010 — Photography, the basis of cinema, is also the foundation of Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments. The Swedish title of Troell’s feature, his fourteenth, translates as Maria Larsson’s Everlasting Moments, which alludes to the photographs taken by its lead character, images of...

Mar 23, 2010 — If we adapt the language of horse breeders to the genealogy of films, we might write Yojimbo, by Shane out of Scarface.But while this odd coupling does suggest the most obvious hereditary traits of Akira Kurosawa’s black comedy, it fails...

Nov 1, 1999 — The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a profoundly beguiling movie about sex, love, and rebellion.

Feb 1, 1988 — Charles Laughton’s classic has the feel and the force of an American folk fable; yet, it also mixes rural humor with gothic humor, biblical quotation and Freudian symbolism, and everyday realities with a near-mythic confrontation between the forces of good...