A book review by Liza Palmer. In 2004, I had the pleasure of reviewing the first edition of Tony Lee Moral’s Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie for Scope. When I was approached to review the revised edition, I did not hesitate, recalling the first version to be a strong, […]
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
December 17, 2013
By Cleaver Patterson. A book like J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit was always going to be too big in size and scope to be contained, should it ever be made, by just one film. Whether this justifies stretching it over three, as New Zealand director Peter Jackson has done, […]
In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2012)
December 14, 2013
By Robert Kenneth Dator. Every single bit of visual stimulus that comes to the human brain via the visual cortex must be interpreted, learned, and filed away for future reference. This morgue of literally countless images—and more important, bits of images—from every conceivable axial point of reference serves as a […]
AFI 2013 Festival Report
December 11, 2013
By Michael Miller. AFI Fest unspooled along Hollywood Boulevard November 7-14, 2013 to almost entirely full houses. The event permits a sizable number of free tickets available to the public via an online lottery. This enables a large, diverse audience to partake of the equally diverse cinematic fare. Here is […]
Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music (2012)
December 11, 2013
A Book Review by Jack Curtis Dubowsky. Henry Mancini—the iconic composer of ‘Moon River,’ ‘Peter Gunn,’ ‘Baby Elephant Walk,’ ‘The Pink Panther,’ over 100 feature films, and winner of twenty Grammys and four academy awards—leaves a problematic musical legacy. As John Caps, author of this new book, puts it, “His […]
The Thalia: An Appreciation
December 8, 2013
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Does anyone remember The Thalia, located at 95th and Broadway, one of Manhattan’s greatest revival houses? I pretty much grew up there. It opened in 1931, and closed in the mid 1980s. The still above is from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977); I’d use another still […]
Trouble in Paradise (1932)
December 7, 2013
By Adam O’Brien. Like Roberto Rossellini, Ernst Lubitsch is a filmmaker whose greatness is both clear and very difficult to articulate. Penetrating and illuminating writing on his work (like that on Rossellini’s) is something of a rarity, and the availability of his films on DVD has been somewhat patchy. But […]
The 20th Annual Austin Film Festival
December 5, 2013
By Jacob Mertens. At some point during the madness of Halloween—in which flying monkeys from Wizard of Oz gave pedicab rides, No-Face from Spirited Away handed out candy to strangers, and Sleeping Beauty staggered drunk through the streets—downtown Austin yielded to a strange confluence of cinema and life. It was […]
Anikó Imre’s A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas (2012)
December 4, 2013
A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. The increasing visibility of Eastern European films—those of the Romanian New Wave, especially—in the United States has brought with it a corresponding rise in volumes published on the subject, including, most notably, East European Cinemas (2005), The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema […]
Seconds: the “Lost” Frankenheimer Returns
December 1, 2013
By Matthew Sorrento. Prominent for years on American television, John Frankenheimer’s Seconds had disappeared by the advent of DVD and remained unavailable until the recent Criterion release. With a generation unfamiliar with any official print, the film was gone – like its central character’s appearance by the end of the first act. […]