This and That

Jan 17, 2014 — The bravura centerpiece of Jules Dassin’s model heist thriller, Rififi, is the elaborately staged burglary itself—a nearly half-hour sequence without dialogue. With surgical precision, the film’s career criminals go about their business in silence—a brilliant directorial choice that leaves us...

Dec 10, 2013 — In 1998, I interviewed Little Edie Beale, the surviving star of 1976’s Grey Gardens, one of the Maysles brothers’ numerous masterworks (Gimme Shelter, Meet Marlon Brando, and With Love from Truman are equal in technical and emotional innovation). Miss Beale,...

Sep 11, 2013 — When Samuel Fuller’s elegantly pulpy Shock Corridor premiered on September 11, 1963, surely few would have predicted we’d look back on it as a benchmark of American cinema. But this intense film—about a Pulitzer Prize–seeking journalist who goes undercover in...

Jul 31, 2013 — The story of the author’s long correspondence with the silent film icon.

Jul 29, 2013 — Guillermo del Toro’s historical thriller and supernatural horror film The Devil’s Backbone is clearly the work of a film artist with an immense imagination. But according to the writer-director, it was also inspired by a real-life experience that haunts him...

Jul 11, 2013 — In this video, contemporary cinema’s preeminent monster lover, Guillermo del Toro (Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone), tells us about his passion for the original Godzilla, a film that is more serious and poignant than most may realize. Del Toro’s latest effort,...

Jul 8, 2013 — With its marvelous, distinctive camera work, Kenji Mizoguchi’s searing drama is as technically remarkable as it is humane.

Oct 10, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled...

Sep 7, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled...

Apr 27, 2012 — Film scholar Annette Insdorf does a great job summing up The Unbearable Lightness of Being in her terrific new book on Philip Kaufman.