The Legend

Oct 22, 2019 — Muhammad Ali was thirty-two years old when he arrived in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974 to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. Thirty-two is not prohibitively old for a boxer in the heavyweight division. (As I type, the most...

Oct 21, 2019 — Songbook If you weren’t a devotee of the Cantopop world in the early 1990s, the casting of Faye Wong in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994) may not have caught your attention. Starring in her first major role, the singer looked...

Sep 17, 2019 — Fusing the melodrama of Douglas Sirk and the ballyhoo of William Castle, John Waters’ sixth feature, Polyester (1981), was a departure from the scrofulous 16 mm mode of production he had made his cult name plying to midnight-movie crowds in...

Jul 25, 2019 — My first three films—Angela, Personal Velocity, and The Ballad of Jack and Rose—are all mysteries of female identity, how it can be warped, destroyed, or saved, particularly in the context of family and sexual love. These films are highly charged...

Mar 21, 2019 — “The world is full of skeptics,” Detour’s Al Roberts struggles to explain, in voice-over, while on-screen we’re pondering Vera’s dead body. “I know. I’m one myself . . .”Even now, closing in on seventy-five years after the Producers Releasing Corporation...

Oct 4, 2018 — Repertory Picks Tonight at 7, as part of its tuneful series Cinema Jukebox, the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Massachusetts, throws the spotlight on one of the last great American films of the 1970s, as Bob Fosse’s showstopping All That...

May 25, 2017 — This Saturday night, the Nickelodeon in Columbia, South Carolina, goes inside the world of Bob Dylan with D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 Dont Look Back, as the film takes over the big screen after an introduction by local singer-songwriter Jade Blocker....

Apr 25, 2017 — After a string of ill-fated productions, Francis Ford Coppola channeled his feelings of self-doubt in this deeply personal take on S. E. Hinton’s beloved novel.

Sep 2, 2015 — In preparation for our upcoming release of D. A. Pennebaker’s groundbreaking 1967 Bob Dylan documentary Dont Look Back, we recently visited the legendary filmmaker at his home, where he introduced us to an old friend. Photo by Grant Delin That’s...

Apr 24, 2015 — Atypical in style and subject, Yasujiro Ozu’s early crime dramas show a future master brilliantly experimenting with camera and editing.