From Karkhe to Rhein

Lizzie Francke has written about film for Sight & Sound and the Guardian and is the author of Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood. From 1997-2001, she was the Artistic Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. She now works...

Veteran music journalist Michael Azzerrad is the author of Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana (Doubleday, 1993) and the upcoming Just Gimme Indie Rock: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 (Little, Brown). He once caught a sunfish...

Sep 10, 2013 — Novelist John Le Carré created one of literature’s most fascinating characters in Alec Leamas, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’s main heavy, who is on a final, fateful mission in East Germany. In Martin Ritt’s movie version, now...

Dec 8, 2010 — Over at his New Yorker blog, The Front Row, Richard Brody dives back into Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning, the Criterion edition of which is his DVD pick of the week. Over a lovingly assembled montage of clips from...

Apr 27, 2010 — The lineup for the seventh annual Cannes Classics, a sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival that highlights new restorations of classics and films previously thought lost, has been announced on the festival’s website. The exciting program will present eighteen titles,...

Nov 1, 2019 — No studio embraced the artistic potential and infectious joie de vivre of the movie musical like MGM did in the 1940s and ’50s. Built from the stuff of dreams, the form became a showcase for some of the most versatile...

Sep 13, 2019 — With The Cloud-Capped Star, Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak reinvented the melodrama. The story of a refugee family’s increasing dependence on self-sacrificing eldest daughter Neeta (Supriya Choudhury), the 1960 film makes innovative use of an array of striking techniques—including elliptical editing,...

Sep 10, 2019 — The Criterion Channel’s series of prison-break classics showcases eight masterful takes on this most nerve-wracking of suspense subgenres.

Jul 29, 2019 — Three decades after its release, Spike Lee’s masterpiece Do the Right Thing stands as one of the most politically audacious, and visually captivating, films of his career. With the help of cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, Lee vividly captured a sweltering summer...

Jan 25, 2019 — Gifted with crack timing and a caustic wit, Elaine May first came up as an improv comedian in the late fifties, forming the popular satirical tandem of Nichols and May with her college classmate Mike Nichols. By the time May...