A Son

Mar 31, 2016 — Since its initial release more than half a century ago, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves has been lauded as one of cinema’s greatest achievements. Loosely adapted from a novel by Luigi Bartolini, the film centers on a father’s quest—with his...

Dec 15, 2015 — Burroughs: The Movie, the culmination of late director Howard Brookner’s NYU thesis project, follows William S. Burroughs over the course of five years and provides “an authorial profile such as has never been and may never be matched.”

Sep 8, 2015 — Brian De Palma magnifies the pleasures and perils of Hitchcock and toys with the viewer’s spectatorship in his sly and scary horror masterpiece.

Feb 17, 2014 — Flailing fathers, anxious mothers, and their moody offspring—these characters may have tails, but they’re Wes Anderson people through and through.

Jul 14, 2012 — Simply stated, Wes Anderson is the most original presence in American film comedy since Preston Sturges. He is as boundlessly confident as  Sturges was in his heyday, and he has a similarly keen ear for gaudy dialogue; a gift for...

Mar 13, 2012 — In the becalmed atmosphere of today’s Hollywood, it’s hard to imagine the tumult that greeted The Last Temptation of Christ when it was released in 1988. Brilliantly directed by Martin Scorsese, this adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s imaginative retelling of the...

Oct 28, 2011 — The following is excerpted from a 1972 interview that film scholar Joan Mellen conducted with director Kaneto Shindo. The interview originally appeared in the 1975 book Voices from the Japanese Cinema. I find the social dimension of your films very...

Nov 18, 2010 — In Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, terror and tenderness grapple with each other as profoundly as the words HATE and LOVE when they’re tattooed, one per hand, across the knuckles of the sadistic preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum)....

Aug 2, 2004 — Anna Magnani’s flair for demotic street comedy was transfigured into stylized nobility by sumptuous costuming and Jean Renoir’s formal camera work.

Tony Peake is the author of Derek Jarman (The Overlook Press, 2000) and two novels: A Summer Tide (Abacus, 1993) and Son to the Father (Little, Brown, 1995). As a short story writer, his work has been widely anthologized, and...