Charles Taylor

People's memories of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 Band of Outsiders (showing in a new 4K restoration) tend to emphasize the obvious delights: the scene where the three young leads (Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur) do the Madison in a Paris café, or the one where, with the goal of......

Star presence, that distillation of charisma and sometimes glamour, lies at the heart of the movies' appeal. The star presence James Harvey evokes so richly in his new book, Watching Them Be, is never simply about physical beauty. Harvey rightly points out that Ingrid Bergman's fresh unaffectedness was distinctly unglamorous,......

In its journey from reviled groundbreaker (a studio release with an intentional NC-17 rating) to revered camp classic, Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls is yet to be considered, as no less than the great French director Jacques Rivette has called it, “one of the strongest recent American films.” (A state of affairs......

It’s all in the eyes. There have been actresses since Sissy Spacek whose big, wet peepers have given the impression that they’re peering at the world fresh from the lily pad (Molly Parker, for one). But not one of them has conveyed the capacity to be wounded, displayed the fear......