Fanny and Alexander: Dark Christmas
Bertil Guve. Photo: SFI Ingmar Bergman would have been 100 years old next year, so in his honor Stockholm’s leading department store dedicated their annual Christmas window display to Fanny…
La La Land: An Enchanting Year in the Sun
Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. Photo: Lionsgate Remember that opening scene from Manhattan (1979)? It’s a montage of different New York City images beautifully captured in black and white by…
Rashomon: One Death, Four Stories
Toshiro Mifune and Machiko Kyo. Photo: Daiei The Rashomon effect is a term that entered the English language maybe as early as the 1960s, meant to describe an event that…
All About Eve: Blind Ambition
Bette Davis and Gary Merrill. Photo: 20th Century Fox I have no idea if the following is true, but it fits nicely into the mythology. Celeste Holm allegedly walked onto…
Annie Hall: This Is 40
Diane Keaton and Woody Allen. Photo: United Artists In the film’s first scene, Woody Allen as Alvy Singer addresses his audience, letting us know that he recently turned 40 and…
Battleship Potemkin: Turning the World Into Bolsheviks
Photo: Mosfilm Battleship Potemkin was released in 1930 in Germany, three years before Adolf Hitler was elected Reich Chancellor. The film was never a huge hit in its native Soviet…
12 Angry Men: Choosing Life or Death
Photo: United Artists The most famous episode of the CBS anthology series Studio One (1947-1958) is from 1954 and features a teleplay by Reginald Rose. Depicting a process where one…
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: The Crazy Ones
Photo: United Artists Author Ken Kesey considered himself a link between beatniks and hippies, a critic of behaviorism and the conventional. His most famous novel, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's…
American Beauty: Beyond Italian Upholstery
Mena Suvari. Photo: DreamWorks The story of how American Beauty, one of the most celebrated films of the 1990s, was made is the story of how a struggling TV writer…
Grand Budapest Hotel: Fighting a European Sickness
Ralph Fiennes. Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures In February 1942, the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig and his wife were found dead in Brazil after committing suicide. In his native Austria, World…