Live Is Life

Mar 22, 2017 — A tragedian at heart, Shirley Stoler found her Medea in the role of a glowering bandit on the run in Leonard Kastle’s seedy true-crime drama.

Jul 30, 2014 — A friend and longtime scholar of Jacques Demy ruminates on the great director’s career, as well as the port hometown they shared—which would become a magical movie location.

Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...

Feb 14, 2012 — For nearly three decades, Hideo Gosha (1929–1992) made some of the most explosive, artful, and original films in Japanese cinema. Along the way, he also became one of his country’s most established and acclaimed filmmakers. But his reputation in the...

May 25, 2010 — Between 1952 and 2003, depending on how the various serial works are counted, Stan Brakhage made somewhere between 350 and 400 films, about half of them short film poems under ten minutes in length, most of the rest between ten...

Jul 21, 2008 — A dreamy alternative to the standard notion of horror, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s phantasmal film reimagined the figure of the vampire.

Sep 3, 2007 — Jim Jarmusch is a difficult director because he works from the frontiers. What does it mean to be a “frontier” director in the film world today?It means a clear refusal, for ethical and aesthetic reasons, to be part of the...

Jul 24, 2006 — Powell and Pressberger’s poignant work captures the fulfillment and absolute sameness of the everyday and the sacred.

May 26, 2003 — Transcription of a speech given by long-time Derek Jarman collaborator and friend, actress Tilda Swinton

Nov 22, 1999 — Amarcord presents a scathing satirical critique of Italian provincial life during the 1930s, the height of the fascist period (1922–43). In this era, Mussolini’s dictatorship enjoyed its greatest popular support. While Fellini’s depiction of the provincial world under fascism provides...