Akeelah and the Bee

Sep 21, 2015 — During his off hours from running the country, President Jimmy Carter was quite the film fanatic, according to an amusing piece by Matt Novak on the Gizmodo site Paleofuture. Novak, after “painstakingly going through the president’s daily journal,” reveals that...

Apr 6, 2015 — In 2004 and 2005, the makers of Hoop Dreams, in collaboration with Criterion, revisited the documentary’s principle figures, Arthur Agee and William Gates, along with their families, to see what had been happening in their lives since the film’s premiere...

Jan 22, 2015 — Repertory PicksOf all the colorful characters in Robert Altman’s Nashville, the funniest and perhaps most maddening is Opal, the British reporter who claims to be covering the country music capital for the BBC and who always seems to be where...

Apr 4, 2013 — Repertory PicksSince last fall, Janus Films’ traveling series The Films of Pierre Etaix has been introducing American moviegoers to an amazing, until now woefully overlooked, cinematic genius. This week, the retrospective hits the Denver Film Society, starting tomorrow and running...

Aug 8, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors about what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made and compiled the results. The...

May 26, 2011 — Last month, a new art-house theater opened here in Austin, the Violet Crown Cinema. (Our city has several pet names, and one of them is the City of the Violet Crown. Why it’s called that has been completely lost to...

Apr 27, 2011 — As those immersed in American film culture know, Austin, Texas, has been a growing hub of activity for the past twenty years. With the Austin Film Society, such locally based filmmakers as Richard Linklater and John Pierson, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, the Austin Film Festival, the city...

Apr 12, 2011 — After Army of Shadows, Melville and I stayed in touch . . . One day, he announced: “I’m going to make a new film. You’re not composing the score for it; I’ve contacted Michel Legrand . . .” Of course, I was disappointed....

Jan 11, 2011 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Army of Shadows (1969) gives a dramatic account of the extreme dangers faced by the French who resisted the German occupation of 1940–1944. The time of the story is unspecified, but it is probably 1943, late enough...

Sep 30, 2010 — American film legend Arthur Penn, the director of The Miracle Worker, Bonnie and Clyde, and Little Big Man, and other classic movies, died this week at age eighty-eight. When we heard the sad news, we thought of this short reminiscence...