As Good as Dead

Jul 22, 2017 — John Heard has passed away at the age of seventy-two, and both Deadline’s Denise Petski and Variety’s Pat Saperstein are claiming that he was best known as Peter McCallister, the father of Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister in the Home Alone...

Jul 20, 2017 — This year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato wrapped nearly three weeks ago now, and it’s the kind of festival that has attendees reflecting on each edition months and undoubtedly years down the line. Three especially notable pieces have appeared in just the...

Jun 29, 2017 — Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1947 novel In a Lonely Place, “about a World War II flyboy, now a serial rapist and murderer, would have violated just about every commandment in the Production Code,” had Nicholas Ray and screenwriter Andrew Solt stuck...

Jun 25, 2017 — New York. Edgar Wright Presents Heist Society is a BAMcinématek series running from Tuesday through July 23 and, over at the BAM blog, Wright’s got ultra-brief introductions to each and every one of the twenty-two films—including Walter Hill’s The Driver...

Jun 5, 2017 — Catherine Grant points us to the new issue of the open access journal Film-Philosophy. Before we begin paging through it, let’s have a look at a piece by Benjamin Crais which the Notebook ran last December:For Anglophone readers, Jean Louis...

Jun 2, 2017 — A new online quarterly, Film Colossus, has launched with an issue focusing on movie endings. Travis Bean cites Clayton Dillard’s interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul that ran in Slant last year, specifically the Thai filmmaker’s observation that “there are really two...

Jun 1, 2017 — “The greatest filmmakers, like the greatest novelists and poets, are trying to create a sense of communion with the viewer,” writes Martin Scorsese in the new issue of the TLS. “They’re not trying to seduce them or overtake them, but,...

May 17, 2017 — Welcome to the first entry of the Daily at the Criterion Collection. For those of you who don’t know me, since 2003 I’ve been gathering links to essential—or simply fun—reading, news stories, and items of interest into a sort of...

Oct 26, 2016 — The tropes of light comedy give way to a Kafkaesque nightmare in this incendiary critique of moral rot in Franco-era Spain.

Mar 17, 2016 — Decades later, Ingmar Bergman’s self-reflexive masterpiece remains a provocative enigma worthy of close investigation.