His Duty

Jul 7, 2020 — The renowned composer of well over four hundred film scores was equally at home in avant experimentation and tear-jerking sentimentality.

May 12, 2020 — In the early 1950s, director John Sturges, then under contract at MGM, read a condensed version of Paul Brickhill’s memoir The Great Escape, which details the mass escape of downed fighter pilots from the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III...

Apr 1, 2020 — Cultural institutions around the country are cutting back, but it’s the fear of losing Film Comment that has set off alarms among cinephiles.

Feb 18, 2020 — In what was no doubt an appeal to subtitle-averse audiences, advertisements for the U.S. release of Teorema (1968) trumpeted, “There are only 923 words spoken in Teorema—but it says everything!” A meager few of those utterances are expended in an...

Feb 26, 2019 — He gave us some of the greatest musicals ever made and followed up with winning comedies, romances, and thrillers.

Feb 4, 2019 — All four of this year’s top prizewinners have been directed or codirected by women.

Aug 23, 2018 — The director of Computer Chess and Support the Girls finds in John Cassavetes a surrealist whose weirdest set pieces could make David Lynch blush.

Jan 22, 2018 — “It is a part he was born to play, and he does it with exactly the right kind of poignantly ruined magnificence,” begins the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “Rupert Everett has written, directed and starred in this gripping drama about Oscar...

Jan 21, 2018 — “After innumerable plays, books, films, made-for-TV series and specials, and even an opera and a musical, you would think popular culture would have exhausted all the options for telling the story of Lizzie Borden, the New England woman who was...

Jan 4, 2018 — Even as we look ahead to the films we’re hoping to see this year, there’s still some 2017 sorting to do. And let’s begin with Farran Smith Nehme’s refreshing list of some of the older films she caught last year....