Project A

Nov 30, 2016 — 1.Marlon Brando and his father founded Pennebaker, Inc., one of several companies in the 1950s that were started by leading actors and backed by a major studio. This business model became popular as the “Big Five” studio system began to...

Feb 3, 2016 — For more than two decades, photographer Gregory Crewdson has been creating otherworldly images that reveal an eerie side of Americana. His works, typically tableaux of small-town life, transform the everyday into the uncanny.

Dec 2, 2015 — This fall the British Film Institute inaugurated a season-long celebration of on-screen romance with LOVE, its UK-wide series of theatrical screenings and rereleases of classic film love stories—from Badlands to A Room with a View. In conjunction with this month's...

Dec 1, 2015 — Critic Todd McCarthy takes an inside look at Michael Ritchie's outdoor drama, which he calls “spare, cut to the bone, as fine as dry powder. Had Hemingway ever written about competitive skiing, this would have been the right style with...

Oct 26, 2015 — Known to most of the world as the labyrinthine inspiration for Stephen King’s novel The Shining (which was of course the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s iconic 1980 adaptation), the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, is about to get a...

Houston native Wes Anderson’s idiosyncratic directorial style—marked by eccentric, colorful compositions and a fastidious attention to detail—seemed completely anomalous in the U.S. independent film landscape at the outset of his career. But it’s become such an influence on other homegrown...

Nov 8, 2011 — Upon its release in the U.S. in 1983, the theatrical version of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander generated a wealth of controversy. Bergman has always seemed to breed conflict among cineastes (Phillip Lopate, for example, has written recently about the...

Aug 23, 2011 — Intimidation: The Weird Dream MakerImpassioned and dedicated craftsman of some of Japanese cinema’s biggest box-office successes and most eccentric off-genre sorties, longtime Nikkatsu studios mainstay Koreyoshi Kurahara (1927–2002) was a filmmaker with two opposite yet inseparable signature points of view....

Jun 18, 2010 — Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 documentary Crumb, which is coming to the Criterion Collection on DVD and Blu-ray in August, is an almost unbelievably intimate portrait of the underground comics icon Robert Crumb, as well as an examination of his controversial work. And,...

Jun 23, 2008 — The year 1950 marked a turning point in Anthony Mann’s career, the moment when he passed from the series of brilliant film-noir B movies that had established him to the westerns that made him a major figure. Mann released three...