High Time

May 27, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so commonplace that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. Movies, however, reveal this action as more than just the original mode of getting from here to...

May 22, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so common that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. But when this action appears in a movie, it is revealed as more than the original mode...

May 21, 2020 — Judy O’Brien, a ballerina working in a burlesque show to make ends meet, has finally had enough. In the middle of an especially humiliating performance, the audience’s jeering reaches such a peak that she stops, walks down center stage, hands...

May 18, 2020 — It’s hard to imagine Hollywood without Frances Marion. The story of the screenwriter’s career is entwined with the story of Hollywood itself, from its pioneer days to the Golden Age. Part of Marion’s skill as a writer was how her...

May 15, 2020 — Directors, actors, and critics look back on their most memorable moments in movie theaters, and the BFI spotlights the best of Japanese cinema.

May 14, 2020 — Sorely missing the festival this year, filmmakers and critics swap memories and reflections.

May 8, 2020 — The opening and closing credits in a film are a form of housekeeping, fulfilling a legal obligation to compile the names of cast and crew who made the final product possible. Visionary designer Saul Bass saw the aesthetic potential in...

May 6, 2020 — Once seen, the opening credits of Juraj Herz’s pitch-black satire The Cremator (1969) are not soon forgotten. At the beginning of the handcrafted, collage-style sequence, a still close-up of the protagonist’s head, from the eyes up, takes over the screen,...

May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...

Apr 29, 2020 — Perched high above the spa town of Nebelsbad, amid the snow-capped Alpine peaks of the Republic of Zubrowka, sits a sprawling resort that in its old-world heyday served as the epitome of European luxury. For the historical caper The Grand...