In the clip above, Richard Brody discusses his DVD-of-the-Week, Kenji Mizoguchi’s last film, “Street of Shame,” from 1956. Click-through for more: http://nyr.kr/13yi2hu

…we seldom get to witness the actual creative sessions that go into producing films. So I was gobsmacked to discover, recently, that over several days in 1978, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and the screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan worked through an idea Lucas had for a film called “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and they recorded the sessions. And there’s a transcript. And it’s online. 

…Over the intervening decades of enormous wealth and success, both Lucas and Spielberg have carefully tended their public images, so there is a voyeuristic thrill to seeing them converse in so unguarded a manner…

Patrick Radden Keefe reads the transcript of the Indiana Jones creators spitballing about the movie: http://nyr.kr/YdyrUb

(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)

A call for the 92nd Street Y to reconsider its decision and maintain 92Y Tribeca, from Richard Brody: http://nyr.kr/11jvrZi

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

(Source: newyorker.com)

Richard Brody looks at the life lessons of Harmony Korine’s movie, “Spring Breakers”: http://nyr.kr/147yiVT

(Source: newyorker.com)

There’s more breadth and depth—more of a sense of history at large, of the intrinsic and profound horror of the practice and the experience of torture, and of the moral issues involved in political action—in that thirteen-minute sequence than in the whole of “Zero Dark Thirty.” 

Richard Brody on the truthful torture scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Le Petit Soldat”: http://nyr.kr/ZuXX4Z

Shouts & Murmurs: In the interest of brevity, the International Film Festival has issued a single press release to introduce all of this year’s films:

U.S. Films in Competition
105 minutes, English

In this ________ (stunningly forceful / wryly sardonic / charmingly intimate) film, a ________ (powerful male executive / irresponsible male twentysomething / struggling male bohemian) experiences a ________ (single night told in real time / summer of sexual awakening / family weekend in the woods) that he will never forget…

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/12wZVYC

(Source: newyorker.com)

Betsy Morais on Audrey Tautou’s evolution as an actress and her role in the new film “Thérèse Desqueyroux”: http://nyr.kr/WtvgJb

(Source: newyorker.com)

“Stoker” is fundamentally a gothic horror story about the devastating power of secrets: India has been protected from ugliness by parents of good will, who keep it hidden; but the dark, suppressed knowledge bursts forth to destroy the family that the very repression was meant to protect, and the secrecy leaves most bereft the girl it was meant to sustain. In short, it’s a fiction on the subject of the fiction—the lies—on which a family and its mythology are based, and the devastatingly corrosive, corrupting power of those lies to undo the family, the sense of identity, and the values that are built on them.

Richard Brody reviews Park Chan-wook’s “Stoker”: http://nyr.kr/10aToBn

(Source: newyorker.com)