A Very Private Affair

May 30, 2017 — Now that the Cannes Film Festival has wrapped, we’ve got some catching up to do. Let’s begin with Scout Tafoya’s report for the Village Voice on a recent symposium “on film criticism and scholarship commemorating the legacy of German film...

Jun 9, 2014 — In the history of cinema, there have been several notable collaborations between a director and an actress over a series of films. Think of D. W. Griffith and Lillian Gish back in the silent era, Josef von Sternberg and Marlene...

Sep 20, 2012 — The following is excerpted from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by the late Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona...

May 29, 2012 — Harriet Andersson’s Monika is both an erotic object and an empowered female protagonist in Bergman’s groundbreaker.

Mar 27, 2012 — Written in five or six days in 1941, in a seaside hotel where he had gone to get away from the Blitz, and by all accounts scarcely revised before being mounted some six weeks later, Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit became...

Feb 20, 2011 — Melodrama has a bad reputation because it has been abandoned to schematic and conventional interpretation. —Luchino ViscontiSenso, Luchino Visconti’s extraordinarily lush 1954 movie, was never truly released in America. Even though an American star, Farley Granger, and a European star,...

Jul 22, 2009 — Made in 1966 (so quickly that it could almost be considered an improvisation), Jean-Luc Godard’s twelfth feature is arguably the most quintessentially “Godardian” of the filmmaker’s early period— but for those of us in the United States, it is also...

Aug 13, 2007 — Cría cuervos . . . , Carlos Saura's political and psychological masterpiece, was shot in the summer of 1975, as Spanish dictator Francisco Franco lay dying, and premiered in Madrid's Conde Duque Theatre, on January 26, 1976, forty years after...

Jun 8, 2026 — Asia Society presents a seven-film retrospective in New York from Thursday through Sunday.

Nov 24, 2025 — This month brings new collections from Melissa Anderson and A. S. Hamrah and a whole shelf of lives lived with the movies.