The Tough Guy

Apr 14, 2020 — Whether or not you believe it is the greatest year of all for the Hollywood studio system, the wonder of 1939 is the sheer depth of its bench. On a ten-movie best-picture ballot, the Oscars found no room to nominate...

May 24, 2023 — Two of Cannes’s favorite directors, Aki Kaurismäki and Wes Anderson, return to the competition.

Sep 18, 2017 — New York. “The Whole World Sings: International Musicals, a weeklong, thirteen-film series at the Quad, is an education in song-and-dance practices outside the Hollywood one,” writes Nick Pinkerton for 4Columns. “René Clair’s Le Million (1931) [image above] is the earliest...

Oct 29, 2018 — Supporting roles bring potent flavor to classic Hollywood’s darkest genre. In the first installment of a series, Imogen Sara Smith pays tribute to the queen of character actors: Thelma Ritter.

Nov 11, 2002 — Continued from Anatomy of a Love Festival - Part One The real turn-on, though, was the music—twenty-two hours of it, divided into solid chunks that usually ran more than thirty minutes. Friday night was the epitome of what San Francisco...

Jul 31, 2017 — What is the defining characteristic of the femme fatale? Critic Imogen Sara Smith explores the range of this film noir archetype through a handful of classic performances.

Apr 12, 2017 — British director Jack Clayton elicited landmark performances from a host of great ladies of the cinema, including Maggie Smith, Deborah Kerr, and Anne Bancroft.

Oct 15, 2001 — Preston Sturges’s beloved comedy provides insights into the way Hollywood formulas work on us.

Sep 18, 2025 — No movie star was bigger in the 1970s, and he won an Oscar for directing Ordinary People. But Sundance may be his most impactful legacy.

May 21, 2025 — The exiled American director of Try and Get Me! and Hell Drivers depicted crime and violence as the inevitable results of capitalist competition.