Children (, short

Nov 18, 2010 — In Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, terror and tenderness grapple with each other as profoundly as the words HATE and LOVE when they’re tattooed, one per hand, across the knuckles of the sadistic preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum)....

Nov 16, 2010 — To make a silent film in 1931, four years after The Jazz Singer, was to buck the trend in a film industry rapidly divesting itself of silence. To make another in 1936, nearly a decade after the advent of sound,...

Aug 17, 2010 — In his defiantly maverick directing career, which yielded only ten features in thirty-five years, Maurice Pialat (1925–2003) was a stimulant and irritant, agitating the cozy pool of French cinema. His first effort, the lyrically bitter short essay film L’amour existe...

Jul 27, 2010 — Americans got The Secret of the Grain. In France, they got La graine et le mulet (The Grain and the Mullet)—basically, “Couscous and Fish.” Depending on whose table you eat dinner at, the French title can seem as elemental as...

Jul 26, 2010 — The Story of a Cheat: Breaking the Rules While most filmmakers arrive at their profession already possessed of a vigorous love of cinema, Sacha Guitry saw the form, at least at first, as a necessary evil. Paris’s most popular and prolific...

Jun 29, 2010 — Photography, the basis of cinema, is also the foundation of Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments. The Swedish title of Troell’s feature, his fourteenth, translates as Maria Larsson’s Everlasting Moments, which alludes to the photographs taken by its lead character, images of...

May 25, 2010 — Between 1952 and 2003, depending on how the various serial works are counted, Stan Brakhage made somewhere between 350 and 400 films, about half of them short film poems under ten minutes in length, most of the rest between ten...

Mar 30, 2010 — The work of Pedro Costa has progressed in slow, measured steps, but each step has been a giant leap. His slowness is both the condition and the consequence of ethical standards he shares with precious few directors of his generation....

Dec 1, 2009 — The first words we hear are Sam Cutler’s: “Everybody seems to be ready—are we ready?” We were nowhere near ready for what was to come, there at the bitter end of the sixties. I remember that rainy day so well,...

Dec 1, 2009 — In the eight films he’s made since 1991, Arnaud Desplechin has been developing a visionary world, a personal style that goes against the grain of standard cinematic practice today. He’s a master of ensemble mise-en-scène and a brilliant director of...