Xchange

Jul 30, 2014 — A friend and longtime scholar of Jacques Demy ruminates on the great director’s career, as well as the port hometown they shared—which would become a magical movie location.

Jul 29, 2014 — The writer and director is inspired by Lawrence Kasdan’s classic comic drama to consider the joys and disappointments of the baby boomer generation that begot her.

Jul 29, 2014 — Combining a tragic romance and the story of a workers’ strike, this musical melodrama is perhaps Jacques Demy’s most neglected masterpiece.

Jul 23, 2014 — Jacques Demy’s miraculous, melancholy musical is the rare film to use pastiche and artifice to go straight for the heart.

Jul 21, 2014 — Anouk Aimée’s beguiling chanteuse, the title character of Jacques Demy’s romantic debut feature, is the figure from whom the director’s entire cinematic world springs.

Jun 23, 2014 — Peter Davis’s provocative, Oscar-winning Hearts and Minds, released to the American public in 1974, is that rare documentary whose truths and relevance have been underlined and amplified by the passage of time. The title is derived from President Lyndon B....

Jun 19, 2014 — PerformancesTime has added some latter-day ironies to All That Heaven Allows, and not just the revelation that its star Rock Hudson was gay. There’s also the political career of Ronald Reagan, the ex-husband of Hudson’s costar, Jane Wyman—built on the...

Jun 9, 2014 — Your vigilance as an artist is an amorous vigilance, a vigilance of desire.—Roland Barthes to Michelangelo Antonioni, 1979 It’s lamentable that Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the most fashionable vanguard European filmmakers during the sixties, has mainly been out of fashion...

Jun 5, 2014 — The following is excerpted from an interview with Red River editor Christian Nyby that critic Ric Gentry conducted in 1991.

Jun 2, 2014 — One Scene When I first heard about The Human Condition (1959–61), I was already familiar with director Masaki Kobayashi’s irreverent Harakiri (1962), a favorite film of mine where samurai are scum of the earth and honor is equivalent to dirt....