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 [...]

A few weeks back I examined the directorial decisions that went into Fox’s World Series broadcast. Every play in baseball contains an inherent drama easy for a camera to pick out – the duel between pitcher and catcher. This offers an easy, lucid way for the production team to escalate tension, and the natural rhythm between [...]

The nasal whine of Jerry Lewis is slowly screeching it’s way back into the American consciousness. He won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award at the last Oscar ceremony, and he’s returning to Broadway as the director of a musical version of The Nutty Professor, set for the 2010-11 season. And over the past few weeks, [...]

Abbas Kiarostami has retreated from the international scene for most of this past decade, working on a variety of museum installations and digital video experiments that received little to no distribution in the U.S. These pursuits, which include the installation Looking at Taziyeh, the long-take landscape film Five Dedicated to Ozu, and his latest, Shirin,  [...]

This is part of our week-long tribute to Robert Ryan, whose centennial is being celebrated on TCM today and tomorrow with a varied selection of his work. Check the schedule!
Robert Ryan looks exhausted in Men In War, Anthony Mann’s spare Korean War drama. He focuses all of his energy on curling his upper lip, slitting [...]