The Criterion Collection
Jul 31, 2012 — Aki Kaurismäki’s latest working-class fable is his warmest, and his most political.
Jul 26, 2012 — Sometimes a giggle catches on and produces more giggles. This is evidenced here by twenty-three-year-old Chloë Sevigny, as she barely gets through an interview with David Letterman wherein she is pressed for info on Harmony and an upcoming trip to...
Sneak Peeks
Jul 25, 2012 — The erudite, drawing-room milieu of Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan is worlds away from the virile, anything-goes atmospheres of the independent horror movies made by Troma Films. Yet the two came together, ever so briefly, when Stillman cast his friend the colorful...
Essays
Jul 24, 2012 — Whit Stillman’s wry comedy about Upper East Siders looked like a perverse bit of daring in 1990; today it seems like an artifact from an earlier century.
Jul 24, 2012 — Trained as a musician, Jean Grémillon became one of French cinema’s most lyrical artists. His most beloved films were made during World War II.
In Theaters
Jul 19, 2012 — Repertory PicksThe programmers of St. Louis’s fourth annual Classic French Film Festival series, copresented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series, have veered a bit from the usual path by including Chris Marker’s idiosyncratic travelogue Sans soleil...
Features
Jul 19, 2012 — I want to start with my favorite story about Carole Lombard. She began her career in Hollywood in her teens and, as we know, was very attractive. She found herself hounded by the wolves of Tinseltown but came up with...
Essays
Jul 17, 2012 — Down by Law, released in 1986, was Jim Jarmusch’s third movie. Unlike its predecessors, Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984), it did not take off from a semi-documentary view of downtown Manhattan. It was shot entirely on location...
Jul 14, 2012 — Simply stated, Wes Anderson is the most original presence in American film comedy since Preston Sturges. He is as boundlessly confident as Sturges was in his heyday, and he has a similarly keen ear for gaudy dialogue; a gift for...
Jul 11, 2012 — Performances Of all the stultified suburban folks in The Ice Storm, Ang Lee’s diamond-sharp adaptation of Rick Moody’s novel about two Connecticut families in the early seventies, Sigourney Weaver’s Janey Carver might appear the least in need of attention. Most...