The Book of Life

Aug 31, 2011 — A man and a woman are married in a small town. The wedding procession follows them to a canal barge, of which he is the master. His crew, an old salt and a young boy, await them there. The couple...

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)....

Apr 20, 2010 — In 1992, I went to Paris to see some movies that weren’t turning up on these shores, at least not as quickly as I wanted them to. At the time, it meant something particular to be going to Paris to...

Jul 21, 2008 — Carl Theodor Dreyer’s elliptical and dreamlike vampire film defies definitive shots at interpretation.

Jul 7, 2008 — Every decade since 1984 the Toronto International Film Festival has conducted a poll of film scholars, critics, and directors to determine the ten best movies in the history of Canadian cinema. This top-ten list has changed somewhat over the years,...

Mar 17, 2008 — During the Second World War, when Hiroshi Teshigahara was a schoolboy, Japan’s cities—above all his hometown, Tokyo—were mercilessly firebombed. He, and his future associates in countless artistic undertakings, returned to a landscape of bleak ruins. The adolescent Hiroshi was particularly...

Aug 14, 2006 — “Some people think rohmer is in league with the devil,” wrote cinematographer Nestor Almendros in his book of autobiographical reflections on the cinema, A Man with a Camera. He was describing his working experience on My Night at Maud’s (1969)....

Neil Sinyard is emeritus professor of film studies at the University of Hull in the UK. He has published twenty-five books on the cinema, including studies of such directors as Billy Wilder, William Wyler, Alfred Hitchcock, Fred Zinnemann, Steven Spielberg,...

Chris Fujiwara is the author or editor of several books on film, including Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall, The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger, and Jerry Lewis. He is currently working on a...

A longtime critic for the late Village Voice, J. Hoberman is the author of books including a three-volume history of Cold War Hollywood (An Army of Phantoms, The Dream Life, and Make My Day) as well as monographs on Jack...