Wit

Mar 16, 2010 — More than a decade after his death in 1997, the moment is right for the rediscovery of the work of Marco Ferreri. “I think he’s modern. More than modern, in fact,” frequent collaborator Marcello Mastroianni once remarked, encapsulating how far...

Mar 8, 2010 — Forty-seven years after Anna Karina communed with The Passion of Joan of Arc’s Maria Falconetti in Vivre sa vie, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Saint Joan continues to inspire artists. According to a Pitchfork Media report, Will Gregory and Adrian Utley, members...

Feb 24, 2010 — Major Barbara: Stage to Screen It was one of the most improbable linkups in the history of either theater or cinema—as unlikely as Andrew Undershaft’s turning over his munitions empire to Adolphus Cusins, his not-quite-yet son-in-law (and newly declared “foundling”),...

Feb 23, 2010 — Like many other French cinephiles, I discovered Make Way for Tomorrow relatively late, although we had been interested in Leo McCarey for years. We had hunted down his Laurel and Hardy pictures, adored Duck Soup, the best of the Marx...

Feb 17, 2010 — The organizers of All Tomorrow Parties in New York have tapped Jim Jarmusch to be a guest curator at this year’s event. The independent music festival (which for the last couple of years has featured a venue for screenings of...

Feb 17, 2010 — Hollywood craftsman Leo McCarey’s long unsung masterwork Make Way for Tomorrow will soon be garnering deserved attention—we’re releasing the Criterion special edition on DVD February 23. The first out of the gate to sing the film’s praises is Roger Ebert,...

Feb 17, 2010 — The feature film debut of British artist Steve McQueen, Hunger dramatizes the final weeks in the life of Irish Republican Army commander Bobby Sands and his death by hunger strike, aged twenty-seven, in 1981. Combining intense formal control and extreme...

Feb 16, 2010 — It may be news to many, but in addition to creating such larger-than-life characters as The Silence of the Lambs’ Hannibal Lecter and Howards End’s Henry Wilcox (not to mention, once upon a time, the titular protagonist in James Ivory’s...

Feb 10, 2010 — Revanche begins with a reflection of trees in a lake at twilight. They’re seen upside down—an image of nature reversed—yet the earth is eerily calm. This almost otherworldly illusion arouses a viewer’s awareness of perspective, which is then disturbed by...

Feb 9, 2010 — You can’t keep a good woman, or a great movie about a good woman, down. By all accounts, goodness in the real Lola Montez reflected the vagaries of character, not talent. She was, as Cosmo Brown says of Lina Lamont...