In Gefahr und größter Not bringt der Mittelweg den Tod

Mar 27, 2012 — One Scene Along with Who’ll Stop the Rain and Charley Varrick, I first saw The Friends of Eddie Coyle on late-night TV when I was ten or eleven. It would be another twenty-five years before I got ahold of the...

Mar 20, 2012 — In the late forties and early fifties, Robert Altman was getting his start as a director by making shorts for the Kansas City industrial-film producer the Calvin Company. As you may have heard, a 16 mm print of what appears...

Mar 20, 2012 — As revealing as Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker’s The War Room is, there was even more happening behind the scenes of Bill Clinton’s 1992 election campaign that it doesn’t show. For instance, what was really going on with those...

Mar 19, 2012 — Some people have called us “film school in a box,” but this is the real deal. The essential film school introductory textbook, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction, is coming out in its tenth edition in the summer,...

Mar 16, 2012 — Did You See This? • Terence Davies on his new film and stealing from David Lean • Unpublished Spartacus photos • The backlash against the Tiny Furniture backlash has begun. • Where in the Dickens did the BFI find this?...

Mar 16, 2012 — One Scene 1973 Ford Pinto with Tanguy Sky (“3 Women”) 2011 | oil on canvas | 40 x 60 inches Robert Altman’s 3 Women is a surrealistic and unsettling study in identity theft, where personalities intertwine and unravel amid the desolation of the American...

Mar 7, 2012 — This clip is the middle section of Hollis Frampton's Surface Tension (1968). In it, we see a sped-up journey from Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park in New York City. Frampton considered the bridge (along with Stonehenge) to be "one of the primary aesthetic experiences...

Mar 1, 2012 — Louis Malle’s God’s Country is a remarkable account of one hamlet in the heartland of the United States—Glencoe, Minnesota—as seen first in 1979 and then again in 1985. Malle was fascinated by what he saw as a very American brand...

Feb 28, 2012 — The Swedish actor Erland Josephson died this week at age eighty-eight. We can think of no better tribute to the great actor (known especially for his commanding and playful performances in such films by Ingmar Bergman as Cries and Whispers,...

Jan 20, 2012 — Quel scandale! In The Smiling Lieutenant’s “Jazz Up Your Lingerie,” one of the most delightful numbers from all the titles in the Eclipse series Lubitsch Musicals, Claudette Colbert’s free-and-easy flapper Franzi gives Miriam Hopkins’s prim Princess Anna (royalty from a...