Master of the House

Dec 13, 2023 — Through the ages, some tales have spread their seeds like trees, creating forests of imagination. Fairy tales often have that quality. But I doubt that Carlo Collodi, the author of the 1883 novel Pinocchio, would like his story to be...

Jul 11, 2023 — Martin Scorsese drew on the influence of Hitchcock and Kafka for this anxiety-ridden tale of one bizarre night in New York City—a movie that energized him during a tumultuous period in his career.

May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...

Feb 12, 2020 — If you were born in Mexico City in the second half of  the twentieth century, you grew up feeling that everything could come tumbling down in a matter of minutes. You grew up amid the reverberation of past earthquakes—all their...

Dec 14, 2018 — “It’s sad to say, but women do not have much importance in westerns,” observed Anthony Mann, a master of the genre, in a 1957 Cahiers du cinéma interview. Made that same year, Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns begins with a whopper...

Apr 3, 2018 — A little over a month ago now, we posted Marvel mon amour, a video by Daniel Raim in which Stan Lee looked back on working with his good friend Alain Resnais (above with Olga Georges-Picot in Cannes in 1968) on...

Dec 29, 2017 — We open a round of holiday listening and viewing with Bill Simmons and Sean Fennessey’s conversation (99’38”) at the Ringer with Paul Thomas Anderson about Phantom Thread, the few brief clashes he had with Burt Reynolds on the set of...

Dec 7, 2017 — “After mining the American soul (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, The Master) as brilliantly as any working director has in the last fifty years,” begins Robert Abele at TheWrap, “Paul Thomas Anderson moves to 1950’s England for Phantom Thread,...

Sep 24, 2017 — For the final issue in print of the Village Voice, Bilge Ebiri talks with Jonas Mekas, “the 94-year-old filmmaker, artist, critic, poet, photographer, cinema owner, and all-around underground impresario who transformed film criticism, filmmaking, and exhibition throughout the 1960s and...

Jun 6, 2017 — Once again, we open an entry with a tip from Catherine Grant, the new twelfth issue of Cine-Files, a special commemorative issue “dedicated to the films and artistic legacy of Jacques Rivette and Chris Marker.” Editor Mary Wiles: “Both directors,...