Life of a King

Apr 15, 2020 — 1.In 1944, after an intense bidding war, Twentieth Century-Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck acquired the film rights to Ben Ames Williams’s Leave Her to Heaven for $100,000, then an exorbitant price for an unpublished work. Later that year, Williams’s mystery...

Mar 31, 2020 — Everybody loves Show Boat, but where is the love for the woman whose name alone sits above the title in James Whale’s dazzling 1936 film version? Edna Ferber was a best-selling novelist for decades, and in her peak years also...

Jan 27, 2020 — Jason Polan and his drawing of King Kong We’re deeply saddened today by the passing of our friend Jason Polan. Jason was an integral part of the Criterion family for over a decade, responsible for, among many other things, the monthly...

Sep 5, 2019 — Critics split three ways: Joker is just plain great, or great but dangerous, or dangerous and also really quite bad.

May 1, 2019 — With three, possibly four new films opening this year, Ferrara returns to New York to attend MoMA’s retrospective.

Apr 3, 2019 — This month’s round features Dalí’s Marx Brothers movie, Bergman family drama, Welles’s unpublished play, and more.

Feb 8, 2019 — Norman Jewison and Ray Charles, Jules Feiffer and Alain Renais, and Jia Zhangke and Apple.

Dec 3, 2018 — True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 paean to American eccentricity and ordinariness, called to me from the shelves of a video store in Austin, Texas. Subtitled “A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas,” True Stories is not “true”...

Apr 13, 2018 — “Miloš Forman, the anti-authoritarian director who left his native Czechoslovakia for creative freedom in the U.S. and captured Oscars for the masterpieces One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, has died.” Duane Byrge for the Hollywood Reporter: “Forman first...

Mar 30, 2018 — Kim Jee-woon (The Good, the Bad, the Weird) has completed production on Inrang (working title), a remake of Hiroyuki Okiura’s 1999 animated thriller Jinroh: The Wolf Brigade (image above), reports Korean Film News (via Rubén Collazos at Cine maldito). “Set...