He was called “the Emperor” on set: exacting, visionary, unstoppable. Akira Kurosawa not only reshaped Japanese cinema but redefined what world cinema could be. From rain-drenched battlefields to fog-shrouded castles, his films remain among the greatest dreams ever projected. The Emperor of Cinema When Akira Kurosawa strode onto a set, he cut an unmistakable figure:Continue reading “Akira Kurosawa: The Emperor of Cinema”
Category Archives: Film
You’re Right in My Eyeline: The Unforgiving Gaze of Faye Dunaway
Hollywood has always been fascinated by women who refuse to soften themselves for the screen. Few embodied that refusal more fully than Faye Dunaway. From the late 1960s onward, she appeared not as a “new kind” of actress but as something rarer: a classical star with a modern nervous system, a presence equal parts glamourContinue reading “You’re Right in My Eyeline: The Unforgiving Gaze of Faye Dunaway”
Little Edie Beale: The Cult of Grey Gardens
American culture has always harbored a fascination with women who live on the edges of society’s expectations. Few embody this fascination more vividly than Edith Bouvier Beale — “Little Edie” — the reclusive socialite turned cult icon immortalized in Albert and David Maysles’ 1975 documentary Grey Gardens. Draped in improvised turbans, brooches, and scarves, sheContinue reading “Little Edie Beale: The Cult of Grey Gardens”
Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye: Neo-Noir in a Sunlit Los Angeles
When Robert Altman released The Long Goodbye in 1973, the film was met with bewilderment. Audiences expecting a classic Raymond Chandler adaptation were confronted instead with a languid, ironic, and deeply disenchanted vision of Los Angeles. Altman transformed Chandler’s hard-boiled detective story into a commentary on America’s crumbling myths in the early 1970s — aContinue reading “Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye: Neo-Noir in a Sunlit Los Angeles”
Annie Hall: Neurotic Romance and the Language of Love
When Annie Hall premiered in 1977, it rewrote the rules of the romantic comedy. Woody Allen’s film — intimate, self-reflexive, simultaneously comic and melancholic — offered a portrait of love not as escapist fantasy but as memory: fractured, playful, and painfully human. In a decade dominated by the epic (from Jaws to Star Wars), AnnieContinue reading “Annie Hall: Neurotic Romance and the Language of Love”
Diane Keaton (1946–2025)
The world of cinema has lost one of its most singular and beloved figures. Diane Keaton, the Oscar-winning actress whose mix of wit, vulnerability, and fearless individuality reshaped the idea of the modern movie star, has died at the age of 79. Born Diane Hall on January 5, 1946, in Los Angeles, she took herContinue reading “Diane Keaton (1946–2025)”
Missing the Summer & the Sea? Here Are Five Films That Take You Right Back
When the days shorten and the air turns crisp, nothing transports us back to sun-soaked afternoons and the languid rhythm of the Mediterranean quite like cinema. Some films capture not just water and light, but also the psychology of summer — its languor, its tensions, its beauty, and its dangers. Here are five iconic filmsContinue reading “Missing the Summer & the Sea? Here Are Five Films That Take You Right Back”
Jørgen Leth, Poet of the Ordinary, 1937–2025
Jørgen Leth, the Danish filmmaker, poet, and cultural omnivore whose quiet, incisive images revealed the beauty—and strangeness—of the everyday, has died at 88. For more than six decades, Leth moved between poetry, film, and journalism with an almost anthropological detachment. Yet his work was never cold. It shimmered with curiosity, whether trained on the ritualsContinue reading “Jørgen Leth, Poet of the Ordinary, 1937–2025”
Grey Gardens at 50: The Eccentric American Dream
Today marks fifty years since the premiere of Grey Gardens on September 27, 1975 — the Maysles brothers’ documentary that unveiled the eccentric, crumbling world of Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter “Little Edie.” Half a century later, the film remains as haunting and magnetic as ever: a portrait of decline and resilience that hasContinue reading “Grey Gardens at 50: The Eccentric American Dream”
Claudia Cardinale: A Life in Light and Shadow
Claudia Cardinale, indomitable star of Italian and European cinema, has died at the age of 87. Born Claude Joséphine Rose Cardinale in 1938 in La Goulette, Tunisia, to Sicilian immigrants, she rose from modest beginnings to become one of the defining faces of post-war film, grace and grit entwined. Her death marks the closing ofContinue reading “Claudia Cardinale: A Life in Light and Shadow”
My World of Interiors 