Old Well

Jan 2, 2020 — Steven Spielberg, Sofia Coppola, Spike Lee, Wes Anderson, Chloé Zhao, and Joanna Hogg are among the many directors ready to roll out their latest features.

Dec 31, 2019 — Even with the Globes and Oscars still ahead of us, we’ve now entered the final round of serious list-making.

Dec 20, 2019 — The following account was scratched together in August 1990, when Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World was still taking shape in the editing room. Apart from a basic rinse of copy editing, I’m offering it up essentially as is,...

Dec 10, 2019 — Wim Wenders has often referred to his Until the End of the World (1991) as the “ultimate road movie,” and even he may not realize how accurate that description has turned out to be. It certainly was, and remains, the...

Dec 3, 2019 — As the title card comes up, the movie has already begun, with a frontal view of a dilapidated plantation house, its ivied columns sporadically lit up by a raging storm. Spectators at the time of the film’s release who were...

Nov 26, 2019 — Bette Davis gets the first laugh in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), and a little over two hours later, she gets the last laugh too. The film opens at the dinner for something called the Sarah Siddons Award...

Nov 26, 2019 — In a key scene of the beloved Bette Davis film Now, Voyager (1942), the heroine goes to dinner on a cruise ship wearing a cloak decorated with fritillaries. A fritillary is a spangled butterfly, and the scene signals that Charlotte...

Nov 22, 2019 — Critics are praising the French New Wave icon’s joyous and reflective final film, which hits theaters in New York this week.

Nov 19, 2019 — In 1989, film critic Raphaël Bassan coined the term cinéma du look. Describing a tendency in French cinema that had begun in the early eighties and would continue into the nineties, Bassan identified commonalities in the work of Jean-Jacques Beineix,...

Nov 11, 2019 — Dark Passages I. Vacancy All the rooms are the same. There is always a skeletal bedstead with an uninviting mattress; a scuffed chest of drawers; a grimy little sink; a naked light bulb; bare walls on which the memory of...