Listing his favorite directors for me one time—among them John Ford and Howard Hawks—Orson Welles concluded: “… And Jean Renoir! I’ve loved him most of all. …” In the 1950s, the Young Turks of the French New Wave—Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol, etc.—acclaimed Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock but reserved the highest place in their pantheon for Read More
Peter Bogdanovich’s Movie of the Week
One of the hardest-to-see, most personal, least commercial and least known of quality pictures to come from the American studio system is Leo McCarey’s profoundly touching 1937 drama (with comedy) about a loving old married couple and their thoughtless grown-up children, Make Way for Tomorrow [ Wednesday, Feb. 4, Read More
If you miss Cary Grant as much as I do-and I mean not only the movie star, the actor, the man, but also the kind of civilized style and ebullient, urbane and witty persona the name calls to mind-there are two good opportunities to see the original article. Both were made by Grant’s favorite director Read More
Peter Bogdanovich’s Movie of the Week by Peter Bogdanovich
Last week, writing about Jean Renoir (1894-1979)-generally now considered the finest picture maker the West has produced-I specifically mentioned a number of superb films from his first mature period (1931-1939) and, as from a stroke of Aladdin’s lamp, two of these are on this week, Read More
Former stand-up comic Jonathan Groff is the head writer of the best live-action comedy show on TV, Late Night With Conan O’Brien. He has been with the show over two years, and he’s in charge of a team of 12 writers (with two women), including Andy Richter and Conan O’Brien …
Mr. Groff said the Read More
When I recently served as guest curator of the French Institute’s current series on remakes, one of my duties was to moderate a panel of movie critics. It was a lively, contentious discussion, full of overlapping dialogue as we wandered merrily over the map of world cinema-French films, dubbing, globalization, various bowdlerized versions of Singin’ Read More
Writing about the Impressionist master Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) nearly half a century ago, the Italian critic Lionello Venturi spoke of “the surprise continually caused by his huge number of pictures and the disappointment frequently experienced by persons looking at his pictures for the first time-a disappointment which always ends, however, in a victory for Read More
