What Happened Was...

Aug 30, 2016 — Set in nineteenth-century Macao, Orson Welles’s adaptation of a classic tale by Isak Dinesen is a hypnotic meditation on the pitfalls of storytelling.

Mar 18, 2016 — The French filmmaker discussed revisiting the world of his breakthrough feature, his desire to communicate with a younger generation, and his signature cinematic flourishes.

Oct 23, 2010 — In 1945, a teenage Stanley Kubrick was given a job as staff photographer at Look magazine, where he published more than nine hundred striking images, most of them in the realist style of New York School street photography. By the...

Oct 19, 2010 — With Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa set out to debunk some of the more inflated myths that had attached themselves to the samurai.

May 11, 2009 — Novelists learn not to expect too much when their books are made into movies. Obviously, great fiction has been turned into great cinema, but the dents and scrapes that so many classics have sustained on the rocky road from the...

Nov 29, 2021 — The composer and lyricist who reinvented the American musical was “more of a film buff than a theater buff.”

Jan 20, 2026 — A smash hit at the box office, this electrifying adventure film established the team of director Michael Curtiz and actors Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland as one of the most iconic creative partnerships in Hollywood.

Jan 23, 2019 — Under the Influence With his latest movie, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville trained his focus on one of cinema history’s most outsize personalities. The film—released just months after Neville’s Fred Rogers profile Won’t You...

Sep 27, 2017 — Filmmaker Allison Anders recalls a story about her time working with the late Harry Dean Stanton on the set of Paris, Texas.

Oct 23, 2012 — After winning an Oscar, John Schlesinger used his newfound artistic freedom to make a personal film in which homosexuality is treated as groundbreakingly ordinary.