Columns
Words Like Bullets: How ‘Smell Smell’ Met with Success
Why ‘Sweet Smell’ Succeeded […]
This Quarter in Film History
Features
TAIL POP: The Enduring Influence of Jean-Luc Godard and ‘Band of Outsiders’
I grew up in a Long Island suburb among people about whom a friend once said, “If they can’t eat it or wear it, they don’t want it.” […]
Columns
How Emilio Fernández’s Classic ‘Enamorada’ Boosted Mexican Cinema
“It was possible to create a Mexican cinema with our own actors and our own stories, without having to photograph gringos.” […]
Columns
Popcorn, Dailies and Guinness: John Sayles on the Making of ‘Secret of Roan Inish’
Since making his first independent film, “The Return of the Secaucus Seven,” Sayles has established a unique relationship with the industry. […]
Columns
When Editing Began: The Cut that Launched a Filmmaking Craft
By the time film pioneer Georges Méliès made this only slightly exaggerated claim, the making and exhibition of narrative film was establishing itself as a business separate from the variety stage and lecture circuit. As more people visited storefront theatres to see moving picture stories, they watched the art and craft of editing evolving on screens right before their eyes. […]
Columns
There’s More Than a Riot Going On!
Prisons are not visually attractive. That may be why prison movies were not a significant genre during the silent era. But after the introduction of talking pictures and as sound technology was refined, the 1930s saw the studios turn out over 60 movies set in penitentiaries. […]
Columns
More Than Just Another Fine Mess
Kurt Vonnegut dedicated his 1976 novel ‘Slapstick’ “to the memory of Arthur Stanley Jefferson and Norvell Hardy” — better known as Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. In the novel’s prologue, the author explains, “I have called it Slapstick because it is grotesque, situational poetry, like the slapstick film comedies, especially those of Laurel and Hardy… […]
Columns
Fear of a Black Planet
Over the decade leading to 1973, with the progress achieved by the civil rights movement, a greater awareness emerged in the African-American community of its own history and culture. Despite this growth of self-worth, pride and initiative giving strength to the idea of Black Power, the systemic practice of inequality and oppression of minorities continued to afflict American society. […]
Columns
‘The Piano’ Ain’t Got No Wrong Notes
From the age of six, Ada McGrath refuses to speak, yet film audiences first saw and heard how clearly she communicates on May 15, 1993, when Jane Campion’s ‘The Piano’ premiered at the 45th Cannes International Film Festival. […]
This Quarter in Film History
‘Broadway’ Playback
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s film legacy is its musicals. Perhaps because it was the most politically conservative of the major studios, MGM was more comfortable with melodramas and musicals than with social issues. […]