In 1963, Alfred Hitchcock had a huge amount of power in Hollywood. That’s when he plucked actress Tippi Hedren from relative obscurity to star in his new movie, The Birds. It was a big break for Hedren. But she says that over the course of making that film — and another movie, Marnie — Hitchcock […]
I have spent large chunks of my life in repertory movie theaters. Coming to cinephilia at the height of auteurism, and being both an auteurist and a completist, eager to see all of my favorite directors’ works, I would track down obscure titles, like The Model and the Marriage Broker during my George Cukor phase, […]
The NFL continues to wrangle with its issue of players taking a knee during the national anthem, but this isn’t the first time The Star Spangled Banner has collided with politics, race and a major sporting event. In 1968, a rising Puerto Rican pop star, José Feliciano, was asked to sing the anthem before Game […]
October 13, 2017 —Frederick Wiseman’s voluminously fascinating documentary “Ex Libris” is ostensibly about the New York Public Library system and its many branches, but, like all of this 87-year-old director’s best work, it’s about a great deal more than its stated subject. Since 1967, with “Titicut Follies,” Wiseman has looked deeply into the lives of […]
From certain angles, it seems entirely remarkable that Joni Mitchell—one of the most cerebral songwriters in modern pop and a woman whose relationship to the spotlight has always been deeply ambivalent—ever became a massive star. From other angles, her ascension seems inevitable. She was so precociously talented that she composed hits in spite of herself, […]
Faces Places (Visages Villages in French) is an unexpected—and perhaps final—gift from the visionary eighty-nine-year-old director Agnès Varda. Varda had previously announced that her 2008 documentary self-portrait, The Beaches of Agnès, would be her last film, doubting that she had the physical strength to undertake another full-length feature. But chance, which Varda has often acknowledged […]
NEW YORK — What would Walter Kerr think? It’s a safe bet that Kerr’s name will mean nothing to many of the Bruce Springsteen fans who, starting Tuesday, will be filling the 975 seats of the Broadway theater on West 48th Street that honors the late, great drama critic for the New York Herald Tribune […]
W.S. Merwin puts a blueberry on the railing of his lanai for a cardinal that visits him every morning at his home in Peahi. Cardinals, doves, thrushes and other birds sing and flit through the forest filled with thousands of palms and other trees that engulf the renowned poet’s quiet and peaceful home. Mosquitoes arising […]
“This is just a rough draft,” the choreographer Twyla Tharp said on a sunny afternoon in her apartment on Central Park West. “We must be nervous if we’re a writer.” But truthfully, she didn’t seem that anxious as she read material for an upcoming talk in Chicago called “Minimalism and Me.” No, she was in […]
To former tennis champ Billie Jean King, the 1970s were “a very exciting and tenuous time.” After all, while women couldn’t get a credit card in their own name without having it cosigned by a man, and at best women were making 50 cents to the men’s dollar, Title IX did become law in 1972, […]
Back in 2012, Kathy Bates lit up a cigar, spat out some salty zingers and won an Emmy for her guest role as the ghost of Charlie Harper in “Two and a Half Men,” the CBS sitcom cocreated by Chuck Lorre. Now she’s lighting up again — only this time it’s reefer — as Ruth […]
Street photography likes to dress our wicked impulses in dignified clothes: it gawks, jeers, heckles, and points. It rips out whole fistfuls of urban life, only to lay them before us as the righteous truth. Basking in a city’s unrehearsed harmonies and telling clashes, it can reveal something big and necessary about lives that must […]
