The Classic

Mar 26, 2012 — A Night to Remember, the 1958 British film adaptation of Walter Lord’s 1955 book about the brief life and agonizing death of the Titanic, has proven unsinkable. With its Olympian yet unfailingly life-size view of the disaster that scuttled illusions...

Mar 21, 2012 — The famed collaboration between director Mikhail Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, which, with its distinctive combination of effective melodrama and a wild, powerful visual style, helped make Kalatozov the most successful Soviet cinematic export of his generation, in fact spanned...

Nov 22, 2011 — 12 Angry Men (1957), the first feature film directed by the legendary Sidney Lumet, is a Hollywood classic that, ironically, helped to define an era of filmmaking grounded in the gritty realism and frenetic energy of urban New York. A...

Apr 28, 2011 — Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles will host a special screening Friday, April 29, of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, as part of the annual TCM Classic Film Festival—and the mighty gladiator himself will be there. Kirk Douglas, who at ninety-four is...

Oct 18, 2009 —  So many worlds stream in from every direction in Monsoon Wedding that it comes to seem as if the whole globe is converging on a single family home in New Delhi: relatives from Houston, from Australia, from Dubai (“Muscat, actually”);...

Jan 25, 2009 — Conventional wisdom once held that any European film worth seeing passed through the New York Film Festival. Still, when I first began reviewing movies for the Village Voice in the late seventies, there were some legendary exceptions: Tarkovsky’s The Mirror,...

Oct 24, 2005 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s great film flirts with macho extremism and slips over into dream and poetry just as it has us most alarmed.

Dec 2, 1991 — In 1972, Stephen King began writing a short story entitled “Carrie”. The opening revolved around the unexpected and late arrival of Carrie White’s first menstrual period in front of her classmates in the girls’ locker room. But, King stopped when...

Feb 11, 1990 — Bob Rafelson’s ultimate road movie is a relaxed masterpiece, a film of laid-back innovation that hasn’t aged one iota since its original release.

Jul 20, 2022 — A brutal critique of the American dream, Carl Franklin’s 1995 thriller explicitly confronts the racialized implications of classic film noir.