The Witness

Oct 25, 2016 — On their way back to Mumbai, the filmmaking pair dropped in for a chat about their film The Cinema Travellers, which documents the last traveling-cinema exhibitors of the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

Jun 1, 2015 — A legionnaire turned fruit seller misses out on Germany’s economic miracle in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s breakthrough melodrama.

Feb 19, 2015 — The scholar and producer talks about his experiences on the set of a film that changed his life.

Jun 5, 2014 — The following is excerpted from an interview with Red River editor Christian Nyby that critic Ric Gentry conducted in 1991.

Nov 6, 2012 — When Akira Kurosawa made Rashomon (1950), he was a forty-year-old director working near the beginning of a career that would last fifty years, produce some of the greatest films ever made, and exert a tremendous and lasting influence on filmmaking...

Dec 18, 1989 — Billy Wilder’s comedic genius is on full display in this beloved classic starring a never-better Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis, who spends most of the film in drag.

Mar 26, 2020 — Deep Dives BOOM! Mahler (1974) begins auspiciously and iconoclastically, as befits its director, with a peaceful lakeside scene shattered by an abrupt conflagration. The combusting hut echoes Kiss Me Deadly and anticipates The Sacrifice and Lost Highway (Lynch: “I got...

Dec 18, 2018 — Half a century before Julien Duvivier made his 1946 film Panique, the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon published his influential study of mob behavior, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, in which he argued that recent upheavals in...

May 3, 2016 — Last night, HBO premiered British filmmaker Adam Benzine’s Oscar-nominated documentary Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah. In interviews and dug-up footage, Benzine’s film traces the twelve-year production of Shoah, Lanzmann’s groundbreaking nine-hour 1985 Holocaust documentary. Shoah, which eschewed archival images...

Feb 16, 2016 — In Death by Hanging, Nagisa Oshima spins a complex aesthetic web around his documentary-like structure, packing detail, history, politics, and emotion into his surrealist inquiry into capital punishment.