Like It Never Was Before

Mar 13, 2017 — In late 2016, I was commissioned by the Criterion Collection to photograph the cover and interiors for the edition of Andrew Haigh’s masterful 45 Years. I’m a photographer and artist based in the UK, and I had first worked with...

Oct 26, 2016 — The tropes of light comedy give way to a Kafkaesque nightmare in this incendiary critique of moral rot in Franco-era Spain.

Jul 5, 2016 — Arthur Hiller’s 1979 comedy pairs Alan Arkin and Peter Falk as unlikely comrades in a madcap farce that lands every laugh.

Aug 17, 2015 — François Truffaut’s love letter to the movies is a lightheartedly self-reflexive symphony of camera movement and musical flourish.

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

Dec 5, 2012 — The following is excerpted from an interview that originally appeared in the February 1, 1981, issue of L’avant-scène: Cinéma. It was conducted by Olivier Eyquem and Jean-Claude Missiaen. Eyquem is a documentalist and former staff member at Positif; he blogs...

Jul 6, 2012 — Samuel Fuller wrote this extraordinary “interview” piece shortly after White Dog was completed. It appeared in issue 19 of the journal Framework in 1982, with this introduction: “The director of Paramount’s White Dog interviewed the title actor of the movie...

Mar 27, 2012 — The mysterious letter was signed “Joe.” David Lean’s lawyer had sent me a batch of old correspondence. Struggling with a biography of Lean, I was desperate for any leads, and this one seemed worth following up. But how does one...

Oct 26, 2010 — A coming-of-age story about a clique of teenage schoolgirls who will never grow old and a demon spirit in the guise of a spinster who was never young, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s eye-poppingly demented, jaw-droppingly inventive House is 1970s Japanese pop culture...

May 27, 2010 — Dismiss from your mind, momentarily at least, the John Ford we know, who could define himself with the three words “I make westerns.” Before Stagecoach (1939), Ford’s talking pictures played out in submarines, penitentiaries, and Scottish castles, in Mesopotamia, colonial...