And at Last

Nov 15, 1999 — Great comedy cannot be confined within normally accepted boundaries of taste and sensitivity. The essence of the Pythons was that they were always ready to take on formidable, daunting subjects that others might find too dangerous to contemplate. The idea...

Dec 11, 2008 — Technical director Lee Kline, just back from Paris, where he worked on Last Year at Marienbad with Alain Resnais, reports: I was a little nervous to show Alain Resnais our new transfer of Marienbad, but I pushed hard to have...

Feb 10, 2003 — The poet Paul Eluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car. Ordinarily, I would settle for that. However, with so much being written about the film...

Mar 31, 2016 — At the beginning of Julia Cafritz’s senior year of high school, she saw Peter Weir’s The Last Wave and decided to drop out of high school, skip college, move to Australia, marry Mr. Weir and devote her life to filmmaking....

Apr 18, 2011 — In this photograph of the Brattle Theatre circa 1953, you can see a sign that says “Opening Soon! Foreign Films.” The brilliant idea behind the sign belonged to Harvard classmates Cy Harvey and Bryant Haliday, without whom the Brattle Theatre...

Jan 22, 2009 — Last fall the Criterion Collection and Janus Films joined forces to acquire a first-run film for theatrical distribution—a rare move for two companies best known for handling the classics of cinema history. Revanche, both an existential thriller and a quiet,...

Nov 21, 2008 — John Lurie, whose band, the Lounge Lizards, was one of the most acclaimed jazz groups of the eighties and nineties, has recorded twenty-two albums and has acted in several films, including Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and The Last...

Feb 21, 2007 — It was bound to happen. After a good start for the blog, a quiet stretch. The year has gotten off to a busy start. Every minute there seems to be a meeting with a new player about a new technology...

Nov 20, 2006 — It’s been a few weeks since Peter and I started this blog, and we are gratified that the response has been so positive. We debated for a while whether or not I should have hot-linked my email address last week,...

Nov 18, 2018 — This sensuous, sprawling epic, which Ingmar Bergman intended to be his swan song, offers an effortless summing up of the themes—among them family, identity, and mortality—he'd spent a career exploring.