The Front

Oct 16, 2017 — J. Hoberman will be at Light Industry in New York tomorrow evening to introduce a program of films he’s calling Against Riefenstahl: Charles A. Ridley’s The Lambeth Walk (1940), Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak’s Why We Fight: The Nazis Strike...

Aug 8, 2017 — “The gaffers and grips, the electricians and sound men, all the technicians begin to mill about briskly on the thick-sodded grass adjacent to the ice-rimed children’s wading pool. Even the park’s casual strollers, walking their diarrheic poodles and mastiffs, begin...

May 19, 2017 — We’ll get to the film at hand in a moment, but first—and just briefly—there’s no getting around the controversy that’s all but dominated the first couple of days at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It began, really, when the festival...

Mar 17, 2016 — Decades later, Ingmar Bergman’s self-reflexive masterpiece remains a provocative enigma worthy of close investigation.

Jun 27, 2014 — The American war in Vietnam was officially divided into two halves: the military war and “the other war: the war to win the hearts and minds of the people,” which gives Peter Davis’s 1974 documentary its title. Whereas the aim...

Jan 22, 2013 — With his unique use of new 3D technology, Wim Wenders found an unprecedented way for the movie camera to capture bodies in space.

Jun 18, 2012 — Theater’s ultimate autobiographer, Spalding Gray, and cinema’s invisible-man auteur, Steven Soderbergh, teamed up for an eye-opening movie monologue.

Mar 9, 2012 — The cinematographer tells us how he and Louis Malle went about shooting Vanya on 42nd Street in a decrepit Manhattan theater.

Feb 2, 2011 — This essay first appeared in the winter 2010 issue of Brick, a literary journal based in Toronto. It is posted here by permission of the author. Michelangelo said he could sense the figure in the uncut stone; his job was...

Aug 24, 2010 — Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928) was first and foremost a star vehicle for Emil Jannings, the internationally known, Swiss-born actor, who had left Germany in October 1926 to work for Paramount Pictures. During his two and a half...