a house not ours//pilgrims

Mar 21, 2011 — Living Room The cinema of Mikio Naruse is one of heartbreak but also one of indomitable poise. Melodrama is the director’s stock-in-trade. His stories are inhabited by people, generally women, imprisoned in their domestic and professional circumstances by the status...

Feb 22, 2011 — It wasn’t intended. No one could have predicted it. But Sweet Smell of Success turned out to be a terminus where several movie genres and subgenres converged and curdled, producing a uniquely delicious perfume of everlasting cynicism. Inhale deeply. And...

Jun 29, 2010 — Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard had a hard time finding a publisher but was well-known by the time Luchino Visconti began working on his film of the same name. The book appeared in Italy in 1958 and was subsequently...

Feb 17, 2010 — The feature film debut of British artist Steve McQueen, Hunger dramatizes the final weeks in the life of Irish Republican Army commander Bobby Sands and his death by hunger strike, aged twenty-seven, in 1981. Combining intense formal control and extreme...

Oct 27, 2009 — Who speaks of Howards End these days? Who expounds on the virtues of this magnificent drama, whose traditional style seems almost as distant as its Edwardian setting? Seen today, years past its 1992 release, it strikes one as not only...

Oct 25, 2009 — Costa-Gavras’s 1969 political assassination thriller Z appeared at the end of a decade of burgeoning cultural change and rampant paranoia. In the United States, this Algerian-French coproduction sparked a sensation, not just relaying the European political crisis but perfectly capturing...

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...

Sep 15, 2009 — Words are the trained fleas in David Mamet’s sidewalk circus—dirty words, often bloodstained, usually swarming, that perform their acrobatic stunts for gawkers who will likely get their pockets picked. That’s the reputation, anyhow. More than thirty years after he made...

Apr 23, 2009 — This interview, conducted by Michael Henry, first appeared in the May 1978 issue of Positif.

Nov 27, 2008 — An enormous welter of insoluble problems is on display in Luis Buñuel’s classic—the ending solves nothing; the story just begins again.