To the Stars

Mar 8, 2018 — The first item to be mentioned is Martin Scorsese’s post on Instagram the other day: “That’s a wrap!” Principal photography on The Irishman, starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Anna Paquin, Bobby Cannavale, Harvey Keitel, and Ray Romano,...

Dec 31, 2025 — As we come to the end of 2025, we’re looking back at some of the essays and interviews we’ve shared with you over the past year.

Jun 9, 2021 — Lois Weber was Hollywood’s leading female director in the 1910s and 1920s. But also: she was one of the great directors of the silent era regardless of gender, a filmmaker of remarkable vision who exerted an exceptional degree of creative...

Dec 4, 2020 — Forty years after her death, people still imitate Mae West’s voice: that slinky contralto drawl that hit each Brooklyn-inflected vowel like a cab driver leaning on his horn. The voice would be memorable even if she had by some wild...

Nov 19, 2020 — For most of my life, makeover sequences in film comedies held an irresistible allure. The mousy young woman who realizes her own inner and outer (but mostly outer) beauty after receiving the attentions of the right man (or the right...

Jan 13, 2020 — The romantic comedy Holiday (1938), the third of four collaborations between Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, is a sparkling testament to what makes the pairing one of Hollywood’s most iconic. With the film, George Cukor, who also directed Grant and...

Mar 6, 2019 — Performances As Howard Hawks was preparing to make His Girl Friday, his 1940 version of the classic Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur play The Front Page, he was determined not to repeat what he felt had been a problem with his earlier comedy Bringing Up...

May 17, 2017 — “For its 70th anniversary,” begins Boyd van Hoeij in the Hollywood Reporter, “the Cannes Film Festival has, very appropriately, chosen to open with a film by French auteur Arnaud Desplechin, a Cannes discovery whose feature debut, The Sentinel, played in...

May 11, 2015 — The poignancy of Leo McCarey's tearjerker is due as much to the director's scrupulous aesthetic choices as his unforgettable characters and story.

Jan 10, 2014 — It’s impossible to watch the unforgettable climax of Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and not wonder, How’d they do that? Spoilers ahead: In the scene, Toshiro Mifune’s ruthless warrior, modeled on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, finally gets his comeuppance in the form...