No Way Back

Oct 2, 2014 — The following is a chapter on The Innocents from cinematographer Freddie Francis’s memoir, The Straight Story from “Moby Dick” to “Glory.” It is reproduced here courtesy of Scarecrow Press. The last picture I worked on as a cinematographer in my...

May 13, 2014 — Few national cinemas have confronted the issue of preparedness for war with the creative vigor of England’s. Thorold Dickinson’s The Next of Kin (1942), Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? (1942, from a story by Graham Greene), and, of course,...

Feb 27, 2013 — More than eighty films into his career, Kenji Mizoguchi made this emotionally devastating masterpiece, from a story by Ogai Mori.

Nov 20, 2012 — Michael Cimino’s visionary western is a superbly realized account of a shocking real American tragedy.

Apr 25, 2011 — In 1981, the legendary critic went all out for Blow Out, which she thought was De Palma's most mature work to date.

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...

Jan 21, 2008 — Agnès Varda seizes the kind of immediacy and tension associated, at the start of the sixties, with the cinema verité documentary movement and uses it to create a new form of fiction.

Apr 17, 2024 — Three of this month’s programs blast back to the turbulent midcentury moment when old Hollywood gave way to something new.

Sep 9, 2022 — James Wong Howe was a fighter, and he learned how to be one over the course of a turbulent upbringing. Born Wong Tung Jim in 1899, in the Chinese province of Guangdong, the man who would become one of the...

Feb 6, 2017 — In the inaugural installment of his new column, archivist Michael Chaiken examines the Nobel Prize–winning icon’s unique artistic process through a collection of ephemera.