Once Upon a Time in America was the most hard-fought film of Sergio Leone’s career. He turned his attention towards adapting Harry Grey’s partially autobiographical mobster novel The Hoods at the very beginning of the 1970s, but a combination of rights issues, financing, and the sheer damn scope of the thing meant that 13 years […]

On December 15, 1939, a film premiered in Atlanta, Georgia. It was titled Gone with the Wind, and a more extraordinary example of all the vast lushness that Hollywood can buy had never been seen and never will again. That is the genius of the notorious producer-showman David O. Selznick, a man who made no […]

Steven Soderbergh’s 4.5-hour cinematic study of two years in the life of Che Guevara is absolutely confounding – not least because it’s hard even to figure out how to classify it. An eight-years-in-the-making dream project (financed in no small part by the director’s populist Ocean’s trilogy), the film premiered at the 2008 Cannes festival as […]

In the misty depths of cinema history, when the very idea of a “multi-reel”, “feature-length” movie was still in its infancy, we come across a bizarre chimera: neither fish nor fowl, neither feature nor short. I refer to the serial, a form born and popularised in the early 1910s, and still alive and kicking in […]

Stanley Kubrick once said, “The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List was about six hundred people who don’t,” which is actually a pretty fair criticism if you stop and think about it. By the same token, we might call the exhausting 1985 documentary Shoah a movie about a few dozen […]

One of the chief pleasures of blogging is that you get to set your own rules. Which means, for example, that if I want to take my weekly classic movie review to shill for a new DVD release, then I can damn well do so. Specifically, I’d like to take a moment to talk about […]

The first thing that everyone knows about Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1980 adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz is that it is long, one of the longest narrative films ever made, clocking in at more than 15 hours (more than 15.5 in the American, NTSC version). Everyone knows this because it is not an […]

There exists a rare breed of film that takes as its sole raison d’être is Ungodly Size. It’s easy to call these films “epics,” but that isn’t a full enough term: Seven Samurai and Lawrence of Arabia are mere “epics.” The films I am thinking of are David O. Selznick’s Gone with the Wind, Peter […]

It probably shouldn’t be a thorny question, but it is: what makes a good adaptation of a book into a movie? Thanks to the Harry Potter film series, that question has been bobbing around quite a bit of late, although I suspect that most of the people debating it wouldn’t think that they are trying […]

Thanks be to Criterion’s “Eclipse” line, and its stated mission of bringing lost films back to light! For without it, I would never have heard of, let alone seen, Phantom India, Louis Malle’s six-hour French television documentary from 1969. Yes, I mean this in a positive way. The backstory: in 1967, Malle was sent by […]