F.x. Feeney

Bernardo Bertolucci’s new film, The Dreamers, is a wise, high-energy conjuring of 1968, a year of culture-wide passion and communal daring unforgettable for anyone old enough to have shared those passions. Half a lifetime ago, Bertolucci anticipated its looming fires in Before the Revolution (1964), in which a dreamy young......

Sometime in the early 1960s, between the death of the poet Boris Pasternak and the start of his own career as a poet in the medium of film, young Andrei Tarkovsky attended a séance, at which he playfully attempted to contact Pasternak’s ghost. What transpired marked Tarkovsky so deeply that......

Film director Hubert Cornfield, who became famous in his 20s for making first-rate pictures in 16 days or less — Plunder Road (1957), The Third Voice (1959) and Pressure Point (1962), to name a few — remains, to this day, allergic to idle daydreaming. When he gets an idea, he......

The scene being enacted is a key one from the 1955 classic The Night of the Hunter, one of the most poetic and disturbing movies ever made about the terrors of childhood -- but the players in this instance are not, strictly speaking, children. Instead, we have Shelley Winters as......

We’re looking at a gilded picture frame in rapid, brushing close-ups. Images flutter as if our eyes were somehow being blinked for us. It would appear we‘re exploring a well-known masterpiece by Francisco de Goya, The Clothed Maja -- only we find in the next elliptical glimpse that we’re also......

In the afterlife afforded by American commerce, Walt Disney towers over other film pioneers. Chaplin was revered at his peak as a god, Griffith as a genius — but these men, having only their own talents to sustain them, endured the ups and downs of mortal life and now live......

There’s an uninflected moment early in The Last Castle that crystallizes everything that is best about it. Robert Redford, playing a three-star general stripped of rank and jailed on a 10-year sentence, stands to one side of the military-prison yard, calmly watching a brawl with his hands folded behind his......