From Karkhe to Rhein

Jun 12, 2008 — Spring is ready to surrender to summer here in the Big Apple, and in keeping with my intentions, I sat down and watched The Love Parade and Monte Carlo from the Lubitsch Musicals Eclipse set. I found them to be...

Apr 1, 2008 — As a generation of artists passes, the deaths often seem to come eerily close together, amplifying their individual achievements. In the past couple of weeks, we’ve lost The Naked City screenwriter Malvin Wald, then the incomparable Richard Widmark, and now...

Jun 18, 2007 — The audacious and outrageous political comedy by Yugoslav filmmaker Dušan Makavejev jolts viewers out of complacency and encourages freedom, creativity, and bliss.

Oct 15, 2001 — Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller features two of Hollywood’s greatest stars, rendering their characters' grand romance in all its passion and perversity.

Jul 9, 2001 — With its dunderhead millionaires, erudite bums, effulgently dysfunctional families, and beneficent providence, My Man Godfrey is the Depression comedy par excellence. It is also, superficially at least, a movie about the Depression. A suicidal millionaire regains his zest for living...

Apr 24, 2000 — “Most of Aesop’s fables have many different levels and meanings. There are those who make myths of them by choosing some feature that fits in well with the fable. But for most of the fables this is only the first...

Mar 26, 1998 — In The Lady Vanishes, Alfred Hitchcock pushes the romantic comedy-thriller form to perfection. Endlessly imitated, the film remains unique, even in Hitchcock’s canon. In no other movie but North by Northwest was he able to blend these two genres so...

Jan 8, 1996 — Dodes’ka-den was made at a low point in Akira Kurosawa’s long career-perhaps the lowest that the director has ever known. In the preface of the filmmaker’s autobiography, critic and translator Audie Bock reports that Kurosawa’s commercial prospects became bleak in...

Jul 15, 1991 — For only his second studio film, Peter Bogdanovich chanced directing an adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s elegiac novel about teenagers who come of age in a dying Texas town in the early fifties.

Jun 12, 1991 — I didn’t get very far with my first script collaborator, Kuba Goldberg. Then Jerzy Skolimowski appeared on the scene.