Great Movies
Features
Christopher Plummer: 1929-2021
A tribute to the the legendary, Oscar-winning actor.
A tribute to the the legendary, Oscar-winning actor.
An in-depth preview on the classic noir films that will be playing at Chicago's Music Box Theater from Sept. 6-12.
With FilmStruck gone and no real alternative filling the void at present, Amazon is in a prime position to grab up fans of classic movies.
An interview with film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum about his new two-volume book collection, Cinematic Encounters.
Rest in Peace, Al Nalbandian; Merging of Hollywood and China; Nnedi Okorafor on whitewashing; Decline of the Western; Kristen Stewart on bisexuality.
For the 33rd installment in his series about maligned masterworks, Scout Tafoya examines Ang Lee's Ride with the Devil.
Director James Ivory talks about his film adaptation of E.M. Forster's classic novel.
A bunch of 2016 Oscar nominees and must-own Criterion releases just hit Blu-ray. Pick your favorite!
Albert Brooks on "Defending Your Life"; Profile of Frank Sinatra Jr.; Comic Con on the couch; Sean J.S. Jourdan on "Teddy Boy"; Sterling Hayden's towering screen presence.
On the wealth of new books and materials about Orson Welles on his 100th birthday.
An analysis of recent faith-based releases, including "God's Not Dead" and "Heaven Is For Real."
Alice Munro wins Nobel Prize in literature; film critic Stanley Kauffmann dies at 97; SF Film Society director Ted Hope steps down; documentary oversaturation; Will Self on the changing role of the critic.
As the 66th Cannes International Film Festival gets underway, blogger and filmmaker Scout Tafoya looks back at some especially notable years at the festival with a series of video essays.
UPDATED (08/01/12): Scroll to the bottom of this entry to see my first impressions of the newly announced critics' and directors' poll results.
Vittorio De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" (1948) topped the first Sight & Sound critics' poll in 1952, only four years after it was first released, dropped to #7 in 1962, and then disappeared from the top ten never to be seen again. (In 2002 only five of the 145 participating critics voted for it.) Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (1941) flopped in its initial release but was rediscovered in the 1950s after RKO licensed its films to television in 1956. From 1962 to 2002 "Kane" has remained at the top of the poll (46 critics voted for it last time). This year, a whopping 846 top-ten ballots (mentioning 2,045 different titles) were counted, solicited from international "critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles" -- including bloggers and other online-only writers. Sight & Sound has announced it will live-tweet the 2012 "Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time" (@SightSoundmag #sightsoundpoll) August 1, and as I write this the night before, I of course don't know the results. But, for now at least, I'm more interested in the process.
Given the much wider and younger selection of voters in 2012, ist-watchers have been speculating: Will another movie (leading candidate: Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," number 2 in 2002) supplant "Kane" at the top of the list? Will there be any silent films in the top 10? (Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" and Murnau's "Sunrise" tied for #7 on the 2002 list, but the latter was released in 1927 with a Fox Movietone sound-on-film musical score and sound effects.)
Though there's been no rule about how much time should pass between a film's initial release and its eligibility (the Library of Congress's National Film Registry requires that selections be at least ten years old), most of the selections ten to have stood the test of time for at least a decade or two. The newest film on the 2002 list was the combination of "The Godfather" (1972) and "The Godfather, Part II" (1974) -- but they won't be allowed to count as one title for 2012.
Marie writes: It's official. I have died and gone to heaven. For here below, as part of an ongoing series exploring Britain's architectural wonders, the Observer's architecture critic Rowan Moore, introduces a spectacular interactive 360-degree panoramic photograph of "The grand staircase in the St Pancras Renaissance hotel" - which I regard as one of the most beautiful pieces of architecture I have ever seen. I adore this building and always will; it's the stuff of dreams. (Click photo to enlarge.)
Go here to explore a 360 panoramic view of the grand staircase!
