Last Wednesday, TCM presented the first television screening of Leo McCarey’s MY SON JOHN in decades. It screened as part of the “Shadows of Russia” series, which tracked Hollywood’s depiction of the country from Tsarist times through Soviet rule. Programmed by the NY Post’s Lou Lumenick and the Self-Styled Siren’s Farran Smith Nehme, it offered [...]

Following the tendentious example of the Warner Archive, Universal and MGM have quietly started their own DVD burn-on-demand services. With seemingly no publicity, a dozen MGM titles became available through Amazon’s CreateSpace in December (press release here), with DVD-Rs including Sidney Lumet’s The Group (listed at $19.98, discounted to $17.99). Twenty-five Universal titles became [...]

Akira Kurosawa is a director I’ve long taken for granted. I’ve never bothered to look much farther beyond the recognized classics: Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Kagemusha, Ran. The latter two floored me with their blood-red blood in my image-besotted youth, but I repressed that enthusiasm to make the usual auteurist arguments – belittling Kurosawa in order [...]

Early yesterday, news broke that Eric Rohmer passed away at the age of 89. Dave Kehr has a fine obituary up at the NY Times, and I would recommend Michael J. Anderson’s essay on My Night at Maud’s and The Green Ray for an analysis of his style. The Six Moral Tales will remain his [...]

It’s time to stagger into the new year with eyes thrust forward. No more list-making and list-arguing and dwelling on the decade that was. Let us break free from our immediate history and nostalgia’s uncomfortably warm grip to embrace the rambunctious year to come. We’re going to squeeze out its tender juices one month at [...]

After a lengthy hold-out, I’ve galloped into the loving arms of Blu-Ray. It’s the right time to jump in, as the studios are (rather desperately) pushing the format hard, cutting prices across the board. You can pick up a player for around $150, with many library titles on sale for $10 (most new releases are set [...]

My lists for the top films of the year and of the decade have been posted over at Indiewire, so feel free to rush over there and criticize my choices in the comments back here. Only two English language films made my year-end roundup (The Informant! and Orphan), but there was a whole slew of [...]

Twitter has its uses, including its function as cinephilic program guide. I follow an eccentric crew of film writers and scholars on the service, and often something like the following will pop up:   “DVR alert: TCM, 10:15 am Eastern, Men Are Such Fools”  rare Busby Berkeley, 1938, non-musical, w/Bogart; never seen it.” This was [...]

The decade is almost at a close, and a deluge of film lists has started the conversation about who were the vital movie artists over the past ten years. All of them are worth scrolling through to stoke some self-righteous anger or gratifying head nods, but before I pull together my chin-scratcher about the end [...]