I Thought It Was Love

Mar 10, 2021 — For about five minutes in Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, the lights go down on our movie and we’re shown another—an increasingly deranged propaganda short designed to suss out whether someone is Parallax material. That is to say, an...

Feb 13, 2018 — With the scrappiest of means, George A. Romero created not only a landmark of independent cinema but also an indelible portrait of America as hellscape.

Aug 12, 2017 — At Shadowplay, David Cairns has posted David Melville Wingrove’s tribute to Conchita Montenegro, whose career in theater and film took her around the world from the late 1920s through the mid-40s. Her “triumphant final film” would be the 1944 Spanish...

Apr 14, 2016 — In honor of our disc release last week of the classic John Frankenheimer thriller The Manchurian Candidate, we sat down to talk about the film with the director’s widow, actor Evans Frankenheimer.

Feb 25, 2014 — A testament to Steven Soderbergh’s versatility, this story of a boy growing up during the Great Depression is a tender but tough-minded look at a child’s inner world.

Feb 18, 2014 — The immediacy of an ongoing war electrifies Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful second Hollywood feature.

Oct 30, 2012 — All of them actors? Nearly everyone wears a mask in Roman Polanski’s devilishly clever work of horror.

Sep 22, 2009 — Abandoning the cinematic conventions and references that informed his previous works, Jean-Luc Godard’s explosive crime drama reaches new heights of spontaneity and lightning invention.

Sep 23, 2002 — In 1940 and 1941, David O. Selznick won back-to-back Academy Awards for Best Picture. In 1942, unsurprisingly, he was depressed. His wife, Irene, persuaded him to seek help, and, less than one year later, hale and hardy, he was eager...

May 12, 2008 — If ever an actor could reconcile his natural-born swagger with a kind of pervasive lethargy it was Maurice Ronet, the star of Louis Malle’s staggering psychological drama.