The Fight for Rome

Jan 26, 2010 — Roberto Rossellini’s second postwar film was released in the United States as Paisan, and one can understand why the distributors wanted to use a title familiar to many Americans as meaning “friend” or “countryman” for a work that is at...

Feb 10, 2021 — In 2009 I was working at Technicolor in Rome on a new remaster of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman. I was with my colleague Fumiko Takagi, who was helping out with Italian-English translation during a conversation I was having...

Sep 2, 2022 — Spend the holiday weekend with Hugo Fregonese, Serge Daney, Bertolt Brecht, Michael Schultz, and Todd Haynes.

Mar 18, 2026 — This month’s highlights include a collection of corporate thrillers, a survey of an emerging generation of trans auteurs, and a new installment of Adventures in Moviegoing with Mary Bronstein.

Jan 3, 2023 — A work of pure, rigorous enchantment, the final film in Terry Gilliam’s “Trilogy of Imagination” employs old-fashioned technical wizardry to bring about its wall-to-wall visual astonishments.

Mar 23, 2021 — “Pleasure,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, “is a safer guide than either right or duty.” Surely this is true when it comes to watching films. While cinema can be edifying, most of us go to the...

Nov 21, 2005 — Why would ambitious filmmakers simply film an opera? Many admirers of the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have assumed that their decision to make The Tales of Hoffmann, in 1950, was in some way an admission by the...

Dec 17, 2014 — Trenchant in its portrayal of gender dynamics, sophisticated in its look at the actor’s life, and, of course, hilarious, Tootsie is Hollywood comedy at its finest.

May 2, 2019 — When I first saw My Brilliant Career, when it was released in New York in 1980, I was ignorant of director “Gill” Armstrong. I assumed she was a man, because at the time I could count the female directors I...

Aug 30, 2011 — “It is much less a film than it is myself,” Jean Cocteau wrote to a friend at the time he was making Orpheus (1950), “a kind of projection of the things that are important to me.” As with many of...