The General Line

Apr 23, 2013 — Who is Pierre Etaix and where has he been all your life? This is the story of a filmmaker who was vanished, banished, skipped over. It’s as if one of those invisible cubicles mimes are always getting themselves shut in...

Jan 26, 2010 — If Paris, Texas is a love letter to America and American cinema, it now also has something of the feel of a farewell: the world to which Wenders pays homage is vanishing fast.

Sep 22, 2009 — Something very heavy happened at Monterey last weekend. Those very odd three days began in Friday’s cool gray air as the first of the crowd began to circle through the booths of the fairground. The only word for it then...

Jul 14, 2008 — Linguistic cosmopolitanism in the Babel-like world of commerce and culture is one of Jacques Tati’s several satirical targets.

Apr 17, 2006 — In the absence of a finished, definitive edit of Orson Welles’s enigmatic project, three writers dive into the unsolvable mystery of the film and the different versions presented in the Criterion edition.

Oct 24, 2005 — The hero in Masahiro Shinoda’s popular samurai movie is both a genre figure and an ordinary character, both killer and savior, both larger than life and lost in the mists.

Sep 17, 2025 — One of the most influential comedies of the 1980s, Rob Reiner’s rock-and-roll satire is a remarkably authentic, lived-in portrait of musicians, their egotism, and the industry that feeds off their stardom.

Aug 22, 2024 — This year, Bologna’s annual feast of restorations and rediscoveries showcased one of the most ambitious masterpieces of the silent era, the melodramas of Japanese filmmaker Kozaburo Yoshimura, and other treasures of film history.

Mar 13, 2024 — The subject of a revelatory retrospective at last year’s Morelia International Film Festival, this groundbreaking director ushered in Mexican cinema’s golden age with vibrant explorations of the nation’s folk traditions and revolutionary past.

Oct 17, 2023 — I. “Morbid Cinema” On October 10, 1962, there appeared a brief paragraph from the Associated Press: “Tod Browning, eighty-two, who directed scores of movies between 1917 and 1939, is dead. He succumbed Saturday after an illness, and no funeral plans...