John Patterson

It’s been a full seven years since the American Cinematheque first unveiled its annual cornucopia of shagedelic delights known as the Mods & Rockers festival. Originally conceived in the wake of the first two Austin Powers movies, the series trawled a mile-wide net through the same pop-cultural detritus of the......

Two minor masterpieces carved from the bitter husk of the 1960s make up this superb double bill — both of them shot in 1970-71, one (Two-Lane Blacktop) greeted with incomprehension upon its release, the other (Cisco Pike) barely seen and lost to misty legend for nigh on 30 years. Linked......

As Gore Vidal once sagely noted, the trouble with golden ages is that there’s always some spoilsport around to point out that, in retrospect, everything somehow looks too .?.?. yellow. So it is with the American Cinematheque’s well-chosen survey of the blood-soaked output of a number of independent British studios......

Novelist, filmmaker, falconer, self-pro­fessed shaman and grizzled survivor of that parallel universe called Swinging London, Peter Whitehead is one of those pop-culture bit players whose ubiquitousness makes Zelig look like a camera-shy shut-in. With his Nordic good looks, Whitehead appeared every inch the British aristocrat–cum–matinee idol, despite being a working-class......

Graham Greene went to his grave justifiably disappointed in the many movie adaptations derived from his novels. One of the fascinating conundrums of Greene’s career is that this highly perceptive former film critic, fitfully brilliant screenwriter and author of so many novels dubbed “cinematic” should have suffered so badly at......

In 1967, Louis Malle was commissioned by France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to make a series of films about India. Having planned only a five-week visit, Malle was at once so enraptured and so appalled by the country that he returned several times over the next 12 months — the......