Half a Life

Jul 22, 2017 — John Heard has passed away at the age of seventy-two, and both Deadline’s Denise Petski and Variety’s Pat Saperstein are claiming that he was best known as Peter McCallister, the father of Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister in the Home Alone...

Jul 14, 2017 — Catherine Grant tips us off to Leo Robson’s interview with David Thomson for the January 2017 issue of the White Review. “Hawks is still for me the essential American director of the golden age,” says Thomson, and the conversation’s an...

Jul 10, 2017 — “While many of my more memorable screenings involved companions and cohorts—seeing Barbarella on a second date with the woman I’d eventually marry; catching a revival of Andrei Rublev with a friend as an elderly Russian lady noisily ate stinky borscht...

Jun 28, 2017 — Carice van Houten, seen above in Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book (2006), “is teaming with fellow Game of Thrones regular Nicolaj Coster-Waldau to star in Domino, the suspense thriller from Brian De Palma penned by Kon-Tiki scribe Petter Skavlan,” reports Deadline’s...

Jun 22, 2017 — The new issue of Senses of Cinema opens with a whopping dossier on Budd Boetticher (1916–2001). In his introduction, Dean Brandum notes that “in 1960, at the very moment he seemed destined for A-list status, he walked away from Hollywood,...

Jun 21, 2017 — Those lists of twenty-five best films of the twenty-first century (so far) keep coming, and J. Hoberman’s now posted his, too. He’s customized the rules somewhat, and we can be glad: “My single ‘best’ film-object”—Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010)—“is followed...

Jun 21, 2017 — The interview of the day, hands down, dates back half a century. Via Movie City News comes word that American Cinematographer has posted Herb A. Lightman’s interview with Alfred Hitchcock, which originally ran in its May 1967 issue. What makes...

Jun 14, 2017 — New York’s BAMcinemaFest opens tonight with Aaron Katz’s Gemini and closes on June 24 with Alex Ross Perry’s Golden Exits. “Now celebrating its ninth year, this modest yet prestigious festival, so shrewdly curated, so reliably comprehensive a treasury of contemporary...

Jun 1, 2017 — By turns gritty and lyrical, this portrait of the Syria-Turkey border brings together two pioneers of Turkish cinema.

May 30, 2017 — Now that the Cannes Film Festival has wrapped, we’ve got some catching up to do. Let’s begin with Scout Tafoya’s report for the Village Voice on a recent symposium “on film criticism and scholarship commemorating the legacy of German film...