The Crook

Jun 7, 2019 — He is the most disarming and self-effacing of the English actors who dominated stage and screen in the middle of the twentieth century—the others were John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, and Laurence Olivier. Those fellows carried themselves like grand...

Sep 18, 2024 — We’re reading or anticipating new books from Pedro Almodóvar, Al Pacino, Werner Herzog, and Cher.

Aug 23, 2024 — We’re revisiting key films from Francis Ford Coppola, Martha Coolidge, John M. Stahl, Asghar Farhadi, and Jacques Rozier.

Apr 19, 2023 — Paul Thomas Anderson, Maria Schneider, and fictional figures—Blanche DuBois and Juliet Capulet—figure in this month’s roundup.

Feb 14, 2023 — This month’s roundup opens with an appreciation of Preston Sturges and wraps with a book launch serving donuts and damn fine coffee.

Mar 25, 2022 — With its rambling Victorian mansions and seedy charms, the once-exclusive area of downtown Los Angeles was film noir’s favorite neighborhood.

Dec 7, 2017 — “After mining the American soul (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, The Master) as brilliantly as any working director has in the last fifty years,” begins Robert Abele at TheWrap, “Paul Thomas Anderson moves to 1950’s England for Phantom Thread,...

Jan 14, 2016 — For the lead role of Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend, a melancholy neonoir that fused Wenders’s New German sensibility with classic Hollywood drama, the director needed an actor who could convey menace with complexity. Wenders had his...

Dec 22, 2011 — Performances Ingmar Bergman had originally envisioned Ingrid Bergman in the role of Helena Ekdahl, the matriarch who presides over Fanny and Alexander (1982) like a benevolent, gloriously red-swathed empress. The actress, however, who had already been ailing while shooting the...

Aug 14, 2006 — In terms of consistency of both the content and form of his films, Eric Rohmer is without a doubt one of the most distinctive auteurs in the history of cinema. As with the work of Yasujiro Ozu, within min­utes—seconds, even—of...