From Karkhe to Rhein

Jan 6, 2016 — Celebrated English playwright, actor, screenwriter, and composer Noël Coward brought us many cinema classics, but his relationship with the medium was far from straightforward, as Coward scholar Barry Day explains in a post at Literary Hub.

Oct 19, 2015 — Last week, Joel and Ethan Coen accompanied T Bone to Criterion to talk about the music on Inside Llewyn Davis.

Jun 4, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder stocked the cast of The Merchant of Four Seasons with friends and colleagues from his experimental theater days.

Oh, those movies from the dream factory. There’s nothing quite like them.

Jul 24, 2012 — Whit Stillman’s wry comedy about Upper East Siders looked like a perverse bit of daring in 1990; today it seems like an artifact from an earlier century.

Apr 9, 2012 — Among the lasting artistic contributions to American culture of the great Paul Robeson (born on this date in 1898) was his beautiful, booming singing voice. In addition to being an actor, activist, and orator, Robeson was a star of the concert hall....

We have a killer selection of Japanese gangster films—or yakuza pictures—all from the genre’s heyday in the fifties and sixties.

The images in these films are inextricable from the flawlessly selected tunes accompanying them.

Mar 2, 2010 — If the harrowing, formally daring Hunger, just out in Criterion Blu-ray and DVD editions, left you wanting to deepen your acquaintance with director Steve McQueen’s visceral imagery, you’re in luck, at least if you live in the New York area....

Oct 15, 2009 — Our favorite Manitoban, Guy Maddin, cheerfully grim chronicler of storybook psychosexuality and charmingly modest self-mythologizer, is in Paris now for a special event. Though just fifty-three and very much still working, the filmmaker is the subject of a complete career...