Film History

Unlike many of my colleagues, I did not grow up a film nut. I was a sports nut, particularly baseball, and following my parents’ lead, a Gershwin, Sinatra and Broadway …

The Battleship Potemkin, or Potemkin as it is generally known, galvanized filmmakers around the world because of the audacity of its film editing––especially in the iconic Odessa Steps massacre. Its …

Roberto Rossellini’s Open City (Roma, Cittá Aperta), which premiered in Italy 65 years ago in September 1945, revolutionized the perception and marketing of foreign films in America when it opened …

I have always been envious of those who came to the business because of their love and passion for films. I was born into the film industry and didn’t appreciate …

‘The Complete History of American Film Criticism’ is an encyclopedic effort to chronicle the rise and flowering of film criticism in the 20th century

Because of the film’s enormous reception in the United States, the reviled Japanese former empire became a world player in cinema.

Remarkably, De Sica doesn’t waste any time on setting the scene or on the family’s backstory in this act.  He deems the viewer intelligent enough to take clues from the …

‘Being Hal Ashby’ examines the director’s tormented personal life and childhood, and traces the troubled personal skein into an exemplary body of work in motion pictures

Of all his creations, ‘The Apartment’ is Billy Wilder’s most influential and greatest film. 

By the time movies arrived, all the elements of the legend were in place—except for a cohesive plot line.