The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix

Jun 17, 2018 — The stakes are high. An unknown entertainer newly arrived in a foreign country prepares for her first performance, under pressure to make a hit with a restless, rowdy audience. It is a hot night; the crowd exudes a collective humidity,...

Jun 7, 2018 — Repertory Picks The road to divorce is paved with comedy gold in Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth, playing tonight at the Princeton Garden Theatre in New Jersey. Plagued by suspicions of infidelity, an upper-crust New York couple (Cary Grant and...

Jun 6, 2018 — Anatomy of a Gag In many of his best-known incarnations, Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp is a lonely figure, looking for adventure, romance, and security in a chaotic world. But for his wildly successful 1921 film The Kid, Chaplin gave his...

May 9, 2018 — 1. Born Arutin Sayadyan, eighteenth-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova—whose pen name means “King of Songs”—served as the initial inspiration for The Color of Pomegranates. Sayat-Nova was an ashugh, a troubadour whose verses were set to music that he played on a...

Apr 9, 2018 — Ingrid Bergman’s work in her native Sweden was an early showcase for her dazzlingly precocious talent and emotional depth.

Nov 16, 2017 — Preston Sturges’s screwball masterpiece, about a glamorous con artist who fleeces a naïve millionaire, screens in Baltimore this week.

Aug 24, 2017 — English theater legend Peter Brook’s adaptation of William Golding’s classic tale of youth and violence screens in London tonight in a Criterion copresentation.

Jun 8, 2017 — Repertory Picks Next Wednesday evening, moviegoers across the pond will have a chance to take in Terry Gilliam’s 1991 The Fisher King, the first entry in a monthly screening series at London’s historic Regent Street Cinema cosponsored by Criterion. After...

Jun 1, 2017 — Earlier this spring, Ryuichi Sakamoto gave an exquisitely intimate concert at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Surrounded by a small audience in the venue’s opulent Veterans Room, the renowned Japanese composer was positioned in the center of the...

May 24, 2017 — For my top-prize pick from the 1970s, I’ve chosen a film that enjoyed great commercial success while also stirring up international controversy. Though it was one of the highest-grossing German films of the decade, Volker Schlöndorff’s adaptation of Günter Grass’s...