I Love You to Death

May 18, 2020 — It’s hard to imagine Hollywood without Frances Marion. The story of the screenwriter’s career is entwined with the story of Hollywood itself, from its pioneer days to the Golden Age. Part of Marion’s skill as a writer was how her...

Apr 3, 2020 — Everyone remembers their first time with Toshiro Mifune. With almost anyone else, such a first would be recollected with a shrug or a casual “it was . . . fine.” But Mifune induces delirious and perfect recall: of him flat...

Feb 11, 2020 — The universal success of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma is undoubtedly due to a skill that the director has demonstrated over the course of several decades and many enduring pieces of work. But it is also a sign of our times. What...

Oct 15, 2019 — Born in Denmark to a wealthy family in 1879, Benjamin Christensen dropped out of medical school to receive training as an opera singer, only to lose his singing voice to what was diagnosed as an incurable nervous illness. He then...

Sep 10, 2019 — In this landmark melodrama, director Ritwik Ghatak channeled his grief over the destruction of his beloved homeland, Bengal, in the wake of the Partition of India.

Sep 2, 2019 — Dark Passages Thieves’ Highway A hay cart trundles through a sunny field above Fresno, California, in the opening shot of Thieves’ Highway. This is not an image you expect to see in film noir, which most often breeds in cities, alienated from the...

Aug 19, 2019 — Vitalina Varela leads this year’s award winners at the Locarno Film Festival.

May 28, 2019 — Nadine Labaki’s jury has selected an eclectic range of award winners from this year’s program.

Mar 18, 2019 — The artist and pioneering lesbian filmmaker leaves behind paintings, writings, nearly eighty films, and a grant for aspiring filmmakers.

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...