Jul 15, 2020 — When I first saw The Lady Eve (1941), in my teens, I was certain I had never seen a comedy more perfectly constructed, a judgment that the subsequent decades have not revised. I had also seen none more acutely witty,...

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...

Oct 15, 2001 — Preston Sturges’s beloved comedy provides insights into the way Hollywood formulas work on us.

Jan 31, 2014 — Tim Forbes is chairman of Forbes Digital and a former independent producer and screenwriter. He writes: “At the Brown Film Society in the early 1970s, we ran about twenty different movies a week, showing everything then available, from the lowliest...

Oct 21, 2011 — Our favorite Finn didn’t have an easy time picking his ten favorite titles in the Criterion Collection. On the eve of Janus Films’ 2011 release of his Le Havre, Aki Kaurismäki had this to say: “I didn’t really concentrate for...

May 22, 2024 — Critics in Cannes warmly welcome Rumours, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, and Eephus.

The actor selects two beloved portraits of Hollywood, All About Eve and Shampoo; talks about how Do the Right Thing captures the grit and beauty of New York; and shares why the work of John Cassavetes made her want to...

The comedy duo snatch up everything from Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve to Todd Haynes’s Safe.

Dec 8, 2023 — Roy Waller (Nicolas Cage), the jittery protagonist of Ridley Scott’s 2003 crime comedy Matchstick Men, doesn’t like to think of himself as a common crook. “I’m a con artist,” he insists, and—in a frenzy of self-justification—further explains: “They give me...

Aug 1, 2023 — “Do you want me to turn them loose?” This is what cowboy Perce asks a sad-eyed Roslyn in John Huston’s elegiac The Misfits (1961), and that one question about untying the mustangs he and fellow wranglers Gay (Clark Gable) and...