The Beginning: Making Episode I

Jan 21, 2025 — Lynchian may be impossible to define, but you know it when you see it.

May 9, 2019 — Studio Visits You’d be hard-pressed to find someone more passionate about movie posters, not to mention gifted at making them, than Nashville-based artist and musician Sam Smith. A lifelong cinephile and devotee of design history—today he even cohosts a podcast...

Jul 14, 2026 — In May of 1962, when Martin Ritt arrived in the Texas Panhandle town of Claude to begin filming Hud, he may have sensed that his career was about to change. Hud would be Ritt’s ninth feature but his first personal...

Aug 24, 2019 — The irrepressible Samuel Fuller had quite the career, beginning his apprenticeship in the cutthroat world of New York newspapers at the age of twelve and going on to become a decorated veteran of World War II, before making a name...

Oct 9, 2018 — In a world vulnerable to authoritarianism, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s television epic stands as an example of how an artist can speak to a broad audience about revolutionary politics.

Sep 8, 2015 — Brian De Palma magnifies the pleasures and perils of Hitchcock and toys with the viewer’s spectatorship in his sly and scary horror masterpiece.

Apr 23, 2013 — Who is Pierre Etaix and where has he been all your life? This is the story of a filmmaker who was vanished, banished, skipped over. It’s as if one of those invisible cubicles mimes are always getting themselves shut in...

Apr 9, 2018 — “Most famous for the exquisite 1979 family classic The Black Stallion, and, to a slightly lesser extent, 1996’s Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin-starring drama Far Away Home, [Carroll] Ballard is—despite making only six films in a period of almost forty...

Feb 1, 2018 — We'll start with things to listen to, beginning with the latest episode of the Projection Booth (106’41”). Mike White has invited four authors to discuss Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964): Tania Modleski (The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist...

Sep 1, 2016 — Balancing epic scale with lyrical intimacy, Orson Welles inflects the spirit of Shakespeare’s history plays with his own zest for cinematic invention.