Year One

Jun 29, 2016 — In this essay, first published in Grand Street in 1994, Dr. Strangelove coscreenwriter Terry Southern offers a lively behind-the-scenes look at the film’s production.

Mar 11, 2015 — More than thirty years after his death in 1977, Roberto Rossellini is remembered by your average film buff as the father of Italian neo­realism (Rome, Open City, 1945; Paisan, 1946; Germany Year Zero, 1948) and of actress and model Isabella...

Jun 30, 2014 — The filmmaker’s recollections of the great producer.

Dec 12, 2012 — Even with limited resources, Christopher Nolan proved a force to be reckoned with in his thrilling, auspicious debut.

May 21, 2012 — Certified Copy is no ordinary love story. Though it initially seems like a typical romance, featuring two strangers who meet in a picturesque Tuscan town, it is one of the trickiest films in recent memory. Earlier this year, its director,...

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,...

Oct 19, 2010 — Clock­ing in at three hours and twenty-seven minutes, Seven Samurai’s lengthy runtime underscores the endurance of the samurai lifestyle, its toils and struggles.

Dec 21, 2008 — In 1962, Roberto Rossellini called a press conference in a bookshop in Rome and announced that the cinema was dead. “There’s a crisis not just in film but culture as a whole,” he explained. Increasingly, Rossellini had understood the great...

Mar 26, 1998 — In The Lady Vanishes, Alfred Hitchcock pushes the romantic comedy-thriller form to perfection. Endlessly imitated, the film remains unique, even in Hitchcock’s canon. In no other movie but North by Northwest was he able to blend these two genres so...

Nov 14, 1988 — It is sometimes as important to be in touch with the truths of your own time as it is to be in touch with its metaphors. 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the most influential films ever made, constructed a...