Few filmmakers have career codas more disheartening than Claude Autant-Lara. Though dismissed by members of the French New Wave as part of the artistically sterile “tradition of quality” that supposedly plagued the French film industry […]
Howard Hawks supposedly bet Ernest Hemingway that he could make a good movie out of the author’s worst book. That book, it was decided, was Hemingway’s 1937 novel, “To Have and Have Not.” And the […]
In his insert essay for the Criterion Collection’s recent Blu-ray release of Barbet Schroeder’s seminal General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait, J. Hoberman compares Schroeder’s chilling examination of its eponymous Ugandan dictator to Jean Rouch’s […]
The story of The Marseille Trilogy is the story of one man discovering cinema. Marcel Pagnol could probably have gone his entire life without making a single movie. Born in southeastern France in 1895, Pagnol became the […]
They can’t relate to 99% of humanity. Rebecca and Enid are outcasts in a town some would call a “Ghost World.” The girls are facing the end of high school and the beginning of their […]
Juzo Itami’s Tampopo is perhaps sadly destined to be forever overshadowed by its own reputation as the greatest food porn movie ever made. It’s tragic because behind all the luscious close-ups of scrumptious food is […]
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