The quintessential Ingmar Bergman films, to me – the once that most sum up all of his strengths as a film director, his preoccupations as a writer, and his function in the ecosystem of art cinema – are a set of three movies he made in the early 1960s, right when his international visibility was […]

Ingmar Bergman directed two films released in 1960, and despite all the visible evidence, they’re a matched set. The Virgin Spring is a brutal, heavy, cosmically miserable story of murder with one of the most disturbing rape scenes in cinema history up to that point; The Devil’s Eye – our present subject – is an […]

There isn’t a writer-director who presents a stronger argument for the value of treating film as a collaborative medium than Charlie Kaufman. He is an unmistakable authorial voice: his films all hinge on the existential fear of being lonely and unloved; they almost all involve complicated manipulations of reality, subjectivity, and narrative chronology; they all […]

It will always be a little asterisk on the career of director Ingmar Bergman that the film for which he always has been and likely always will be best-known, 1957’s The Seventh Seal, is among the least-characteristic films he ever made. This is, in and of itself, neither good nor bad, nor anything (though it […]

In the first weeks of 1960, Ingmar Bergman premiered The Storm, his fourth television film in three years, and quite an important milestone in his screen career it was. No artist in any medium was a more obvious influence on the director, nor more readily acknowledged by him as such, than the great playwright August Strindberg, […]

If, as is so often said, Tom Hanks is America’s Dad, it makes perfect sense that he would, at some point, have to be involved in an American Dad Movie. And, of course, he already has, but in the case of Greyhound, his role was far more active than in such dad movies par excellence […]

The phrase which most irresistibly attaches itself to Rabies, a 1958 television play that is maybe the most obscure piece of filmed media Ingmar Bergman ever directed, is “an unpleasant piece”. Bergman himself first described it that way in 1945, in the notes to his production of the play onstage at the Helsingborg City Theatre; […]

Kelly Reichardt has never felt like a director who was forcing her career to go in a certain direction, or build to any kind of definitive statement. Her first six features, dating back to 1994’s River of Grass, share a good number of characteristics, but one of the most important is that they’re resolutely small […]

Brink of Life is an overlooked film in Ingmar Bergman’s career, possibly because he later stepped away from it, but it feels to me like a crucial example of his developing career at the end of the 1950s. On top of being, in its own right, a terrific acting showcase, which by this point was […]

“What if we did a horror movie version of Fantasy Island?” is an idea that makes a certain kind of cock-eyed sense. The TV series in question, which ran from 1977-1984, is about an island in the Pacific where a mysterious man named Mr. Roarke allows visitors to experience their deepest fantasies come to life. […]

I have one thing about Disney’s new live-action Mulan that makes me extremely happy: it’s not a mindless shot-for-shot remake of the 1998 animated film, and in this respect is considerably less irksome than the 2017 Beauty and the Beast and the 2019 Aladdin and The Lion King, the other remakes of films from the […]