To Each His Own

Oct 22, 2013 — The disc of Faces that you now hold is the most beautiful copy possible of a film that was meant to look lousy. Digital technology painstakingly reproduces John Cassavetes’s lighting, which allowed his actors to move about freely, and so...

May 28, 2013 — Mike Leigh’s breakthrough is a funny film about serious things, and an emotional and slyly political take on consumer culture.

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...

Aug 14, 2012 — The Dardennes threw down the gauntlet for a new type of unadorned dramatic storytelling with their breakthrough tale of a working-class boy’s fraught coming-of-age.

Feb 22, 2012 — When it comes to depicting actual people’s jobs, the truism goes, Hollywood gets everything wrong with stunning regularity. The rare exception is Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), widely considered among the finest trial films ever made, and maybe...

Jul 12, 2011 — Naked is the angriest, most bitterly critical attack on the false values of society that Mike Leigh, Britain’s constant chronicler of the tragic comedy of desperate lives, has ever made. Its audacity is that the attack is mounted through a...

Jun 14, 2011 —   The dance along the artery The circulation of the lymph Are figured in the drift of stars —T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets   The year is 1954: a fabulous bit of film history is about to unfurl. Grips are...

Nov 16, 2010 — To make a silent film in 1931, four years after The Jazz Singer, was to buck the trend in a film industry rapidly divesting itself of silence. To make another in 1936, nearly a decade after the advent of sound,...

Sep 30, 2010 — American film legend Arthur Penn, the director of The Miracle Worker, Bonnie and Clyde, and Little Big Man, and other classic movies, died this week at age eighty-eight. When we heard the sad news, we thought of this short reminiscence...

Feb 16, 2009 — Through the story of thunderously, wondrously henpecked men and a determined woman’s romantic zeal, David Lean’s comedy depicts private and social revolution.