Before there was François Truffaut, with his gargantuan series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock that became a book, there was Peter Bogdanovich, who, in his early twenties—fifty years ago—was, in effect, New York’s première activist on behalf of the classic American cinema and its luminaries (most of whom were still alive and working)… 

Richard Brody on Peter Bogdanovich and Alfred Hitchcock: http://nyr.kr/10dViND

Photograph: NBC.

(Source: newyorker.com)

In this clip, Richard Brody discusses his DVD-of-the-Week, Sam Peckinpah’s 1972 film, “The Getaway.” Click-through for more: http://nyr.kr/YqCQ5J

(Source: newyorker.com)

   Richard Brody writes in memory of Ric Menello, a beloved cinematic savant: http://nyr.kr/XZA61J

(Source: newyorker.com)

Richard Brody reviews “Gangster Squad,” and looks at the fake cinema of the season:

In all four films [“Gangster Squad,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Argo,” and “Amour”] the question of knowledge arises: what does the filmmaker know of his situations, his characters (and it doesn’t matter whether the subject at hand is historical or utterly fictitious), and what, in the “telling,” makes for an authentic experience? The short answer: none of the above. In all four, for different reasons, the filmmakers foreclose the characters, clamp down the implications, filter out the context, and thereby fake the results. These films may be the subject of discussion now but will end up on the scrap heap of cinematic history.

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/WImkJf

Photograph: Warner Bros.

Richard Brody on how the Oscar nominations reflect the national climate of art and politics: http://nyr.kr/10ijwuD

Whither French Cinema? Richard Brody on the debate that is roiling the French film industry and its followers: http://nyr.kr/S6RoHc

Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty.

Michael Schulman: “If you, like me, spent Christmas day eating spare ribs and waiting on line to see “Les Misérables” (but maybe not in that order), you’ve had time to contemplate the relative vocal prowess of its stars, not all of whom are exactly Pavarotti. Much has been made of Tom Hooper’s directorial approach, which required the actors to sing live on set, rather than lip-synching to a prerecorded track—with decidedly mixed results. So who fared the best, and who was just plain misérable? A ranking, from best to worst”: http://nyr.kr/TJaCTT

The pinnacle of Colonel James S. Ketchum’s career in developing psychochemical weapons during the Cold War was a field test that he orchestrated at the Dugway Proving Ground, in Utah, in 1964. The test, code-named Project DORK, was designed to gauge whether clouds of a delirium-inducing drug, called BZ, could incapacitate soldiers at distances of five hundred or a thousand yards, in a realistic setting. In “Operation Delirium,” an article in The New Yorker this week about the Army’s Cold War experiments on chemical weapons, I describe the experiment in detail, as well as a film that Ketchum directed about it, called “Cloud of Confusion.” Far from the formal, airless, informational tone that one associates with Cold War propaganda movies, Ketchum’s film is uniquely loose and unpolished; it attempts to capture the mind-altering effect of the drug as much as it seeks to describe it. In his memoir, “Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten,” Ketchum explains, “It was my purpose to create a contemplative, suspenseful mood in order to heighten interest, hoping to distinguish this movie from the usual dry Army documentary.”

The video above, “War of the Mind,” compiled by The New Yorker, provides a brief look into the making of the film, and into the Army’s broader cinematic attempts to document its search for the perfect psychochemical weapon.

See also “Manufacturing Madness,” our video compilation of chemical experiments on soldiers at the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal.

Richard Brody reviews “Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning”: http://nyr.kr/QKpJdb

  In this week’s issue, Anthony Lane reviews   “Killing Them Softly” and “Rust and Bone”