I Was Born, But…

Oct 12, 2010 — One Every movie is two stories: the one it tells and the one that remains to be told about it by those involved in its creation. These two narratives converge in a certain current of the cinema of the past...

May 18, 2010 — Nicolas Roeg’s first solo outing as a director is an astonishing visual poem, by turns violent, innocent, and elegiac.

Apr 26, 2010 — In the late 1940s, driven by the opening-night ovations for A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams embarked on more than a decade of immense success. During this period, he wrote at a furious pace: Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo,...

Nov 11, 2009 — As a member of the Harlem Amateur Players, Robeson had heard a great deal about Brutus Jones from the Playhouse’s set designer, Cleo Throckmorton. Moved by Robeson’s performances with the Manhattan-based troupe, Throckmorton was the first to approach him about...

Sep 17, 2009 — Almost twenty years before they enacted such splendid suffocation in Max Ophuls’s swoony masterpiece The Earrings of Madame de . . . , the agelessly glamorous Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux first starred together in another tear-jerking big-screen romance. Giving...

Apr 21, 2009 — “Just takes a few months to get to be a hundred. If you’re in the right place at the right time.” I first saw Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece The Wages of Fear when the restored version was released in the U.S.,...

Jan 21, 2009 — It’s a clichéd truism that moviemaking is a collaborative art. Of course it is, and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of directors working time and again with the same crew members, trusted writers, cameramen, production designers, editors,...

Oct 20, 2008 — Costa-Gavras’s film pointedly raised issues that for many people were only dimly in the air at the time, and which have become more and more unavoidable in recent years, as the United States has openly assumed its imperial role.

Aug 18, 2008 — This modest-scale psychological drama by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger follows an explosives expert with a drinking problem who harbors a great deal of bitterness.

Aug 11, 2008 —   WINGS: TAKING OFF Of all the dazzlingly talented filmmakers to emerge from the Soviet Union, Larisa Shepitko has remained one of the least widely known. While many of her film school contemporaries, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, and her...