The Tale

Jun 19, 2006 — This essay originally appeared in the fanzine PHOTON (issue #22), in 1972. Stop-motion animation has been attracting a growing number of enthusiasts for about the last ten years, and though it seems the majority of these people must out of...

Oct 29, 1990 — Luis Buñuel’s ode to obsessive love is injected with the biting subversive wit, symbolism, originality and surreal touches that distinguish his finest achievements.

Mar 21, 2019 — “The world is full of skeptics,” Detour’s Al Roberts struggles to explain, in voice-over, while on-screen we’re pondering Vera’s dead body. “I know. I’m one myself . . .”Even now, closing in on seventy-five years after the Producers Releasing Corporation...

Aug 27, 2017 — This month, two captivating masterworks make their way to the United Kingdom in their Criterion editions: Lord of the Flies, Peter Brook’s provocative 1963 tale of savage youth, and The Music Room, Satyajit Ray’s radiant 1958 portrait of a fallen...

Feb 2, 2017 — In her just-released Sundance hit The Lure, Agnieszka Smoczyńska evokes both the decadence and decrepitude of 1980s Poland through the adventures of Silver and Gold, two man-eating mermaid sisters who decide to go terrestrial and soon become a nightclub singing...

Feb 1, 2017 — The latest release from Janus Films, Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s debut feature, The Lure, opens today at New York’s IFC Center. In this spectacular horror-musical hybrid, two carnivorous mermaid sisters are enticed into a lurid life on land in a...

Oct 16, 2014 — Repertory PicksThe Loft Cinema in Tucson, Arizona, is kicking off its annual Loft Film Fest tonight with a very special event. The Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry will appear in person for a screening of The Last Picture...

Sep 11, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled...

Mar 26, 2012 — A Night to Remember, the 1958 British film adaptation of Walter Lord’s 1955 book about the brief life and agonizing death of the Titanic, has proven unsinkable. With its Olympian yet unfailingly life-size view of the disaster that scuttled illusions...

Oct 18, 2011 — Hair, There, and Everywhere Are the Leningrad Cowboys for real? With pointy pompadours reaching to impossible heights above their expressionless faces and needlelike winklepicker shoes that could have been torn from the feet of oversize elves, they might be a...