There exists a body of Hollywood films made in 1932-33 — a narrow window just before and after Franklin Roosevelt's election — that reflected the deep despair of the American people confronted with corruption at all political levels, and their temptation to take matters into their own hands. This type......
It may seem weird to kick off the annual film noir series at the Egyptian (running through May 6) with the little-seen Elliott Nugent version of The Great Gatsby; but then, this 14th edition is clearly intent on expanding the field. Among the usual chestnuts and discoveries, there will be......
Screenwriter Alan Sharp may have supplied the perfect epitaph for Eric Rohmer, who died last Sunday at 89 — the only one that will stick anyway. “I saw a Rohmer film once,” growls cuckold detective Gene Hackman in the Sharp-scripted Night Moves. “It was like watching paint dry.” Many people......
Like his most famous character, Donnie Darko, Richard Kelly’s young career has been about second chances. So it’s no real surprise to see him taking his new picture and its promotion pretty much in stride, three years after his sophomore film, Southland Tales, famously bombed at Cannes and whimpered at......
The glass prow of the new Alice Tully Hall jutting out at 65th & Broadway wasn’t the only sign that the New York Film Festival (September 25-October 11), now approaching the half-century mark, wants to present a new face, if not take an entirely new tack. Routinely perceived as elitist......
There is something eerie about crossing an empty Hollywood Boulevard at 10 on a Sunday morning, walking past the old Christie Hotel and on to the Egyptian Theater to see Turn to the Right, a marvelous (if minor) silent film the great Rex Ingram made for Metro Pictures Corporation in......
Where does fake hair come from? This is the sort of question that gets answered — in this case, by a 1909 French one-reeler on wig-making called D’où viennent les faux cheveux? — at Il Cinema Ritrovato (June 27-July 4), a film festival in Italy which, over the last 23......
When it premiered at last year’s New York Film Festival, where it was one of the most memorable entries, Alexander Olch’s The Windmill Movie was preceded by Richard P. Rogers’ stunning 1970 short, Quarry, and one can only hope the film’s forthcoming HBO broadcast and DVD edition will follow suit......
By this time, news should be out everywhere that Cannes this year was a special vintage. Not only did most of the selected “usual suspects” outdo themselves in big and unexpected ways — or, like Alain Resnais, find new resources and verve which, frankly, we didn’t know they had in......
Was there more to Secret Beyond the Door for Fritz Lang than mere Hitchcock envy? Film historians have long dismissed this 1948 picture, as Lang himself did later in life. The film was a flop and sealed the end of Diana Films, his promising and financially rewarding alliance with star......
