One of the most important elements in a film lover’s education is a good introduction. If you show someone the right Chaplin or Kurosawa film they’ll be a fan of either or both of those directors for life. In that spirit, I’d like to recommend my own introductory film for a legendary director: Alfred Hitchcock…. Read more »
“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again.” — Jean Renoir “Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.” — Joan Didion There Will Be Blood has been acclaimed by some as one of the greatest American films so far… Read more »
If I had to describe The Night of the Hunter (1955) in one word, it would be singular. There is simply no other film like it. It bears traces of influence from several different film movements and belongs to several genres, and it would go on to influence great films and filmmakers. But as a… Read more »
Before World War II, American director George Stevens made lighthearted films such as Swing Time and Alice Adams as well as the rousing adventure movie Gunga Din. But Stevens’s experiences in the U.S. Signal Corp, which included filming survivors of the Dachau concentration camp, darkened his worldview. Stevens would express his new feelings in three… Read more »
During “Funkology,” a conversation with Dr. Scott Brown at the IU Cinema, funk legend Bootsy Collins said he wanted to see less generation gap and more “generation flow.” Collins was eager to see more mutually beneficial conversations between people of different ages, as opposed to screaming matches about who is more ungrateful or more… Read more »
Theater and film have had an interesting give-and-take relationship over the course of their mutual existence. Some of the most acclaimed movies ever made — such as Amadeus and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — were adaptations of plays that remained true to their source materials’ language and theatricality. Likewise, some of the most interesting… Read more »