Train of Life

Dec 12, 2017 — “Grant Munro, a Winnipeg filmmaker whom the National Film Board calls a ‘Canadian film and animation legend,’ has died at the age of ninety-four,” reports Debra Yeo for the Toronto Star. Munro is probably best known for appearing in Norman...

Jun 21, 2011 — Chains: Bound for Glory Film history is replete with artists embraced by critics but misunderstood by the public. For Italian filmmaker Raffaello Matarazzo, it was the opposite. After working for almost two decades as a midlevel studio director of pictures...

May 8, 2017 — Writer Durga Chew-Bose explores her personal connection to Uma Das Gupta’s quietly captivating performance as a carefree young girl in the masterful opening installment of The Apu Trilogy.

Aug 31, 2011 — French sociologist Roger Caillois proposed that every form of human recreation could be placed somewhere on a continuum between two terms: ludus and paidia. The first of these represents games defined almost wholly by their rule systems. Crossword puzzles and...

Jun 17, 2025 — Mitchell Leisen’s marvelously chic and brilliantly constructed screwball classic revolves around a heroine who flounders through a succession of complications but always manages to come out ahead.

Jun 23, 2010 — “Wittily written and spare as a coded message . . . The year’s most perilous ride . . . , we wouldn’t exchange it for a season’s commutation ticket on most of the similar vehicles running out of Hollywood.” So...

Dec 14, 2017 — Following the announcement that Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs will be opening the sixty-eighth Berlin International Film Festival (February 15 through 25), the Berlinale now presents the first eleven titles lined up for its Panorama section, including new work from Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Tokyo Sonata),...

Oct 21, 2014 — There were plenty of advantages to living in Paris in the early 1970s, especially if one was a movie buff with time on one’s hands. The Parisian film world is relatively small, and simply being on the fringes of it...

Sep 30, 2013 — The author describes his interactions with the great Polish filmmaker.

Nov 23, 2022 — In Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens, the odyssey of a New Jersey transplant trying to survive in Manhattan is accompanied by the music of one of the Garden State’s most iconic punk bands.