Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

Jun 24, 2015 — PerformancesThe late character actor Michael Jeter had a profound effect on me as a child, but as with so many things, I didn’t realize it until I was an adult. Twenty-five years ago this month, I saw my first Tony...

Oct 23, 2014 — The author recalls meeting the filmmaker in a Swedish hotel in the ’70s.

Apr 22, 2014 — Carl Theodor Dreyer’s spare and modern visual style perfectly complements this comic and soulful domestic comeuppance story.

Apr 16, 2013 — With its idiosyncratic humor, killer soundtrack, and middle finger to Reagan-era politics, Alex Cox’s film was the perfect cult hit for the golden age of the video store.

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...

Aug 13, 2010 — The Docks of New York When John Grierson, the Scotsman whose absolute devotion to realism on film—he coined the word documentary and created the National Film Board of Canada—was asked how he’d enjoyed a screening of a now-lost Josef von Sternberg...

Apr 27, 2010 — From left: Marlon Brando, Maureen Stapleton, Tennessee Williams, and producer Richard Shepherd, on the set of The Fugitive Kind. It was Jules Stein, head and founder of MCA, who plucked Richard Shepherd out of Stanford and made him into a real...

Aug 24, 2009 — Whit Stillman took a risk when he set his third film during (and titled it after) the disco era, whose erstwhile existence, from almost the moment it ended, has seemed to embarrass most Americans more than Watergate. One would think...

Jun 10, 1996 — Ever since Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction created a sensation at [this year’s] Cannes Film Festival, where it won top honors (the Palme d’Or), it has been swathed in the wildest hyperbole. In fact, it has sparked an excitement bound to...

Aug 3, 2023 — Reubens’s man-child creation was the role of a lifetime, but filmmakers were eager to have him show us his real range.