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The Bellboy On March 16, Jerry Lewis will celebrate his 90th birthday, and the Museum of Modern Art is honoring him with a mini-retrospective of his films. Four years ago I happened to attend the public celebration of his 86th birthday at the 92nd Street Y, which was hosted and moderated by Richard Belzer and featured taped messages from a cavalcade of celebrities including Werner Herzog and Donald Trump. (Trump got booed....

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon sequel. After all, Alien, The Godfather, Infernal Affairs, Before Sunrise, and The Hustler were all stand-alone classics that spawned unlikely sequels. And there’s no reason a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon sequel should be bad. Writer John Fusco isn’t going to win a Pulitzer anytime soon, but he’s responsible for the fast-paced and fun Jackie Chan–Jet Li vehicle Forbidden Kingdom, and for both Young Guns films....

Lost in Hong Kong It’s the same with most of the major Asian film industries. Korea is currently at the top of the heap in terms of talent, and China, with its huge and hungry audience, is the economic engine driving everyone forward. Hollywood is no longer a major force to be reckoned with, and the U.S. is regarded more and more as just another overseas market, rather than the prime mover....

Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019) No trick, all treat: at the end of October, our new Nov-Dec issue will be released—that’s the last Film Comment for the 2010s! Our cover story on Little Women sees Greta Gerwig sit down for an extensive interview with Devika Girish, with other features on The Irishman, Uncut Gems, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire inside. To hear the early word on new issues and all other good things Film Comment, it’s well worth subscribing to our weekly Newsletter, which features a word from the Editor-in-Chief, recently digitized archival pieces, and our Weekly Streaming Picks....

Fueling the enthusiasm and supplying the media pipelines (welcome Oprah, thank you HBO, as ever PBS), Sundance rolled out a new section, Documentary Premieres. Add these to the worldwide, U.S., indigenous, and short docs, and it all made for a hefty slate. I was a Sundance virgin and enthusiastically chased after the nonfiction entries and yet still missed the crowd-pleasers and award-winners Senna, Knuckle, Buck, How to Die in Oregon, and Being Elmo....

It took place on October 8, 2021 in New York. On the run, you might say, had it not happened in a restaurant. Let’s say it came out of the blue, though it was a cloudy day. The next day was John Lennon’s birthday. He would have been 81. More than a decade earlier, in 2010, I had spent the evening of what would have been John’s 70th with my wife, Marietta, at Strawberry Fields in Central Park, following Yoko’s public invitation to mourners....

Jean Arthur, 1932 Listen to a special episode of The Film Comment Podcast: At Home featuring Sheila O’Malley on Jean Arthur and more. When you talk about Jean Arthur, you have to talk about her voice. But how to describe it? Whatever adjective you choose needs to be accompanied by its opposite: her voice is one of paradoxes and duality. To quote Frank Capra, who cast her three times (Mr....

All images from Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper, 1980) “[It’s] the cage of life itself and all the anguish to break through which sometimes translates as flash or something equally petty but in any case is rock ’n’ roll’s burning marrow.” —Lester Bangs, “The Clash,” New Musical Express, 1977 While there have been a number of great movies about punk rock—Jubilee, Rock ’n’ Roll High School, the mighty The Decline of Western Civilization—Dennis Hopper’s 1980 film Out of the Blue, about a punk-obsessed teenage girl, stands alone....

The movie begins with the names of the dead filling the screen on reams of papers. It’s a visual motif that might remind viewers today of Schindler’s List. Here they emerge from a printer on green-bar computer paper, which was so ubiquitous in the 1980s that we are immediately situated in that era. These are contemporary statistics—most of the dates on the right side of the paper say 1984, moving ahead chronologically, day by day, inexorably leading up to the year of this film’s release....

The Blue Dahlia Noir Central through Christmas Eve is New York’s Film Forum, transformed into a cornucopia of delicious nastiness and psychological and sociological disturbance by movies based on the novels and stories of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, and James Cain. The authors celebrated in the series are the immovable cornerstones of American pulp fiction, though Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, and the scabrous Jim Thompson run them close....

My Dinner With André For those of us who found My Dinner with André to be enough André Gregory for a lifetime, Cindy Kleine’s new documentary about her legendary husband may feel slightly unnecessary. But the director, actor, playwright, and self-styled shaman comes off as an even more inexhaustible subject for study in André Gregory: Before and After Dinner than in the seminal 1981 dialogue that first immortalized him. The film runs through a list of Gregory’s achievement, from his fabled 1968 production of Alice in Wonderland and his work as a character actor in Hollywood all the way up to Bone Songs (his 2007 play about his late, first wife) and his latest project, Ibsen’s The Master Builder, translated by Wallace Shawn and soon to be made into a film directed by Jonathan Demme....

My belief that Richard Linklater remains America’s most underestimated filmmaker has been reinforced by the reception thus far to his new film Bernie, treated as either a failed Jack Black comedy or a movie that has not made up its mind about whether it wants to be fiction or documentary, funny or serious. Which leads me to the inescapable conclusion that the dominant influence on American film criticism is no longer Andrew Sarris or Pauline Kael, but early 20th-century parenting manuals....

Not 10 minutes into John Michael McDonagh’s smartass passion play Calvary, a priest walks onto a beach in the noonday gloom, cassock blowing in the wind like a duster. Cutting through the waves is a lone surfer while a half a mile away a group of men on horseback tear up the sand. The priest and the overcast skies are the only thing that place the beach in Ireland. These sights could be found deep in the deserts of Morocco or along the beaches south of Los Angeles....