Into the Okavango

Jan 21, 2014 — For his leading role in Michael Mann’s Thief, James Caan had a lot more to do than just embody perfect cool. His character, Frank, is an ex-con with a particular aptitude for breaking into hard-to-crack safes. Unbeknownst to the actor...

Dec 18, 2012 — One Scene Every time I watch Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, I am stunned that a film could be so full. Here is this thing stuffed with detail, design, behavior, emotion, surprise, and skill. Like Fanny and Alexander and...

Nov 7, 2012 — In this clip from the recent documentary A Testimony as an Image, which reunites members of the Rashomon crew nearly sixty years after Akira Kurosawa’s epochal film was made, lighting and electrical technician Genkon Nakaoka describes the four hours of...

Jul 19, 2012 — I want to start with my favorite story about Carole Lombard. She began her career in Hollywood in her teens and, as we know, was very attractive. She found herself hounded by the wolves of Tinseltown but came up with...

Nov 15, 2011 — The thematic ideas and inspirations that sparked Three Colors: Blue (1993), though typically ambitious in scope, seem sketchy when compared to the intense experience of watching this exquisite film. We know that Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy corresponds to the...

Sep 19, 2011 — When Claude Chabrol’s first film, Le beau Serge, had its premiere at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival (out of competition), a fellow critic at Cahiers du cinéma, François Truffaut, wrote: “Technically, the film is as masterly as if Chabrol had...

Sep 13, 2011 — Robert Altman’s spellbinding drama about stolen identities is propelled by evanescent reveries of his own and inventive contributions from cast and crew.

Apr 12, 2011 — The following is excerpted from Melville on Melville, a book-length interview by Rui Nogueira first published in 1971. How do you feel about your twelfth film, Le cercle rouge? Since there’s no knowing if there will be a thirteenth, l...

Dec 8, 2010 — Over at his New Yorker blog, The Front Row, Richard Brody dives back into Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning, the Criterion edition of which is his DVD pick of the week. Over a lovingly assembled montage of clips from...

Dec 7, 2010 — Guillermo del Toro understands the power of fairy tales. Not the prettified romances of Charles Perrault, who tamed the Brothers Grimm for French drawing rooms, or the charming animal fables of Aesop, or the reassuring moral lessons Disney made of...