To Live

Jul 24, 2014 — Everyday life gets a musical makeover in Jacques Demy’s tale of chance and love, a film of exquisitely sad happiness.

Feb 28, 2014 — Other first films exude the sparkling joy of filmmaking that one feels in Breathless, but how many can boast its sure-handedness?

May 8, 2012 — To start on a personal note: I wrote a book about La haine that came out in November 2005, just as the Paris suburbs (banlieues) erupted in an unprecedented wave of violence. Every night, as in the Bob Marley song we...

Apr 12, 2011 — The following is excerpted from Melville on Melville, a book-length interview by Rui Nogueira first published in 1971. How do you feel about your twelfth film, Le cercle rouge? Since there’s no knowing if there will be a thirteenth, l...

Nov 24, 2009 — For twenty years, the remains of television’s self-proclaimed golden age lay dormant in the vaults of the commercial networks. I remember traveling, as a young researcher for NBC, to Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where the old shows of the fifties...

Jan 21, 2009 — It’s a clichéd truism that moviemaking is a collaborative art. Of course it is, and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of directors working time and again with the same crew members, trusted writers, cameramen, production designers, editors,...

Jun 19, 2006 — Decades after its backyard birth, Jack Woods’s DIY horror movie has forged a model of inspiration for succeeding generations of effects artists and low-budget filmmakers.

Aug 20, 2001 — Carl Dreyer considers the work of art’s soul in this excerpt from Dreyer in Double Reflection.

Nov 2, 2017 — Two leading figures in American independent cinema talk about the challenges of bringing their visions to life on shoestring budgets.

Mar 6, 2017 — To commemorate the anniversary of the late Polish master’s birth this week, critic Michał Oleszczyk pays tribute to his mercurial style, urgent political themes, and sly evasion of the censors.