A Misappropriated Turkey

Feb 6, 2014 — Who better to explain what an auteur of the cinema is than one of the originators of auteur theory? In his famous 1954 essay “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” published in Cahiers du cinéma five years before the release...

Feb 4, 2014 — When François Truffaut was a twenty-three-year-old film critic, in 1955, he read an autobiographical first novel by a seventy-four-year-old writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. “The book overwhelmed me,” he later recalled, “and I wrote: If I ever succeed in making films, I...

Jan 31, 2014 — Did You See This?• Naked Lunch and other adaptations of the unadaptable • David Bordwell on the great critics of yore • The Hitchcock-Nabokov collaboration that never was • A pas de deux from Chantal Akerman and Pina Bausch •...

Jan 28, 2014 — Among the delights of Aki Kaurismäki’s La vie de bohème are the guest appearances by François Truffaut alter ego Jean-Pierre Léaud and the two-fisted American auteur Samuel Fuller. The former plays an eccentric collector who takes an interest in the...

Jan 24, 2014 — Did You See This?• Weekend’s Andrew Haigh comes to HBO. • At the Oscars, more is less, says Mark Harris. • The Big Apple, Scorsese-style • Neil Bartlett on Derek Jarman • Richard Linklater’s most dazzling time experiment yet? •...

Jan 24, 2014 — Aki Kaurismäki first read Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème in 1976. The highly influential 1851 book—an episodic novel about a group of starving artists that also inspired Puccini’s 1896 opera La bohème—captured the Finnish filmmaker’s imagination and,...

Jan 21, 2014 — For his leading role in Michael Mann’s Thief, James Caan had a lot more to do than just embody perfect cool. His character, Frank, is an ex-con with a particular aptitude for breaking into hard-to-crack safes. Unbeknownst to the actor...

Jan 20, 2014 — Aki Kaurismäki pays wry tribute to the starving artist in his sad and funny update of Henri Murger’s classic book.

Jan 17, 2014 — Did You See This?• A Hoop Dreams oral history • Martin Scorsese and Wong Kar-wai—two legends chatting • Thelma Schoonmaker goes long. • A comic turn from J. Hoberman • The total Jerry Lewis • A lost Fassbinder–Schlöndorff collaboration resurfaces....

Jan 13, 2014 — With economy and panache, Michael Mann established his existential crime drama style with this breakthrough first feature.