To Realize

Jul 2, 2015 — By recounting the impossibility of making a movie, Federico Fellini ended up creating a masterpiece that almost fell into his lap.

Jun 25, 2013 — How Claude Lanzmann made a thoughtful film about the unthinkable and unfilmable.

Nov 5, 2012 — The following originally appeared as the afterword to the 2003 New American Library edition of the novel Rosemary’s Baby. Having observed that the most suspenseful part of a horror story is before, not after, the horror appears, I was struck...

Feb 20, 2011 — Melodrama has a bad reputation because it has been abandoned to schematic and conventional interpretation. —Luchino ViscontiSenso, Luchino Visconti’s extraordinarily lush 1954 movie, was never truly released in America. Even though an American star, Farley Granger, and a European star,...

Dec 1, 2009 — Running a taut ninety-one minutes, this documentary about the Rolling Stones is a masterpiece of restraint and understatement.

Jan 11, 2006 — The typical midlife crisis, to which we all fall victim in some major or minor degree, came to Fellini with a slight delay. On the twentieth of January, 1960, the day of his fortieth birthday, he was, in fact, too...

Jul 11, 2005 — Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short story balances realism and fantasy.

Feb 14, 2005 — A touchstone of Jean-Luc Godard‘s political period, the film plays with the idea of recording working-class history as it is happening.

Feb 19, 2001 — Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s romance film spins a web of myth and evocative symbolism around its central search for self-discovery.

Nov 21, 2024 — Dennis Hopper’s bleakly nihilistic drama struggled to find an audience after it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980, but time has revealed it to be one of the most hardcore films about disaffected youth ever made.