Easy Virtue

Feb 2, 2011 — This interview was published in the winter 2010 issue of Brick, a literary journal based in Toronto. It is posted here by permission of the Toronto International Film Festival. The photograph appears courtesy of Colleen Murphy. We met on March...

Jun 25, 2007 — Chris Marker’s masterpiece is a cinematic essay and travel film made up of asides and digressions that form a portrait of late twentieth-century civilization.

Aug 28, 2006 — Pietro Germi’s brilliant satire skewers Italian society’s devotion to appearances and its cultlike obsession with gossip and honor.

Aug 14, 2006 — It’s both hard and not so hard to believe that Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales were conceived—indeed, written initially—as a novel. On the one hand, he’s the grand master of dialogue as an instrument of narrative. His characters muse, reflect, analyze,...

Oct 12, 1998 — Inspired by the stranger-than-fiction true story of identical twin gynecologists, David Cronenberg’s psychological thriller is a melancholic meditation on our very existence.

Dec 4, 1995 — While Carol Reed’s psychological noir is the most compassionate of movies, it’s a poetic summary of twentieth century harshness—of what can be called the inhuman condition.

Oct 25, 1994 — Kenji Mizoguchi develops his medieval fable about moral freedom and slavery with intuition, cunning, and an overarching sense of tragedy.

Nov 23, 2010 — Easy Rider is a record of a certain time in American history, and a chronicle of a culture clash that never quite ended.

Feb 25, 2026 — The director of Civic and Now, Hear Me Good talks about how his experience as a first-generation Caribbean American and his love of Chantal Akerman’s short La chambre have influenced his work.

Nov 26, 2024 — In this tragicomic road movie about a Bible-selling con man and his precocious young charge, Peter Bogdanovich brings Depression-era America to vivid life without sentimentality or nostalgia.