Wit

Feb 6, 2014 — Did You See This?• B-movie beauts • Meet “New Queer Cinema” coiner B. Ruby Rich. • Get to know your Derek Jarman. • Terry Gilliam at the movies • Alphaville and New Wave genre films • Writing by Charlie Chaplin—formal...

Feb 4, 2014 — When François Truffaut was a twenty-three-year-old film critic, in 1955, he read an autobiographical first novel by a seventy-four-year-old writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. “The book overwhelmed me,” he later recalled, “and I wrote: If I ever succeed in making films, I...

Jan 28, 2014 — Among the delights of Aki Kaurismäki’s La vie de bohème are the guest appearances by François Truffaut alter ego Jean-Pierre Léaud and the two-fisted American auteur Samuel Fuller. The former plays an eccentric collector who takes an interest in the...

Jan 24, 2014 — Aki Kaurismäki first read Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème in 1976. The highly influential 1851 book—an episodic novel about a group of starving artists that also inspired Puccini’s 1896 opera La bohème—captured the Finnish filmmaker’s imagination and,...

Jan 21, 2014 — For his leading role in Michael Mann’s Thief, James Caan had a lot more to do than just embody perfect cool. His character, Frank, is an ex-con with a particular aptitude for breaking into hard-to-crack safes. Unbeknownst to the actor...

Jan 21, 2014 — Bigger is better in Stanley Kramer’s crazily crammed slapstick epic, a timeless showcase for comedy genius.

Jan 20, 2014 — Aki Kaurismäki pays wry tribute to the starving artist in his sad and funny update of Henri Murger’s classic book.

Jan 17, 2014 — Did You See This?• A Hoop Dreams oral history • Martin Scorsese and Wong Kar-wai—two legends chatting • Thelma Schoonmaker goes long. • A comic turn from J. Hoberman • The total Jerry Lewis • A lost Fassbinder–Schlöndorff collaboration resurfaces....

Jan 17, 2014 — The bravura centerpiece of Jules Dassin’s model heist thriller, Rififi, is the elaborately staged burglary itself—a nearly half-hour sequence without dialogue. With surgical precision, the film’s career criminals go about their business in silence—a brilliant directorial choice that leaves us...

Jan 10, 2014 — Did You See This?• Reminiscing about Spalding Gray • The Little Tramp is turning 100. • For Dennis Cooper’s birthday, the beauty of Robert Bresson • Still Anger after all these years • Molly Haskell on a new Barbara Stanwyck...