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and his wild, late, tempestuous, erotic masterwork Picnic in the Grass, shown often in the 1970s, almost never now: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

Renoir's own great postwar revisiting of the same artistic territory, in The Diary of a Chambermaid... www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

Because Jean Renoir came up in the other place: I find it important to write about classic movies as extensively and critically as about new releases and have loved doing so with Renoir's films; short thread—first, on The Rules of the Game (don't lose its greatness in overfamiliarity)...

Since Harry Langdon came up in the other place, worth mentioning: he rightly parted ways with Frank Capra and directed himself in two features, among the greatest of silent comedies; his third, hardly released, is lost: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

HBD Mick Jagger!! Key films Performance/Our take: midcenturycinema.org/node/200 Man From Elysian Fields/ @szacharek.bsky.social: www.salon.com/2002/10/08/e... Also Charlie is my Darling/ @tnyfrontrow.bsky.social www.newyorker.com/culture/rich... Thrilling w/Marchese: www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/m...

Charlie Chaplin's indignation at the arrogance of privilege and power, which got him exiled during the HUAC/McCarthy era, is the basis and the engine of his art, even in his quasi-sentimental first feature, The Kid, on @tcmtv.bsky.social at 8: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

correction: is ultimately less a matter of specific details than of a sense of writerly-directorial freedom, of the artistic spirit itself.

inferior or secondary to literature. To me, what the New Wave proved goes both ways: adaptation can be as close to the source as Bresson, or as free and uninhibited as Godard's Masculine Feminine or King Lear; what's depressing and noxious is the half-assed, and The Odyssey talk is all about

Much in that piece reads strangely, some things read all too normally (decrying unfaithfulness to the spirit of the source), but what's most original, fruitful, and radical is his contempt for "equivalences," his belief that nothing is unfilmable—that the cinema is in no way inferior or secondary to

Discourse on The Odyssey is so heated because something bigger than Bronze Age accuracy is at stake. The problem of adaptation is at the basis of modern cinema itself: it's the subject of the New Wave's critical detonator, Truffaut's essay A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.

Great that Robert Bresson's last film, L'Argent, from 1983, is at @metrographnyc.bsky.social at 12:45pm, in a tribute to the sound recordist Jean-Louis Ughetto, because the soundtrack plays a dominant role in expression and substance (I was struck by it when I saw it in first run in Paris):

Embarrassing (or should be) to the critical and editorial community that there are so few reviews of Lost Chapters.

Dommage qu'on ait sorti en France le Gavagai d'Ulrich Köhler, un film de pures intentions qui signifie sans être, plutôt que le Gavagai de Rob Tregenza, un film (de 2016) aussi vivant que virtuose.

A mention in the other place of opera as literary adaptation reminded me of Monteverdi's 1639-40 adaptation of the Odyssey as Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria. Full of gods.

Penny Lane's new documentary Wild Inside is wonderful and took me by surprise; its form (largely crowdsourced) is as unusual as its subject (Flaco the Owl); it opens next Friday; word in Goings On: link.newyorker.com/view/5bea068...

Lost Chapters, Lorena Alvarado's first feature (opening Friday at @ifccenter.bsky.social), is a graceful family drama of literary inspiration and substance—and a lesson in cinematic style and form: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Nolan still has to make films that make money—albeit also with respectability; a few directors whose names are synonymous with an aesthetic, a worldview, the art of cinema itself, don't; that's a greater power.

HBD Paul Schrader!!! Living embodiment of the New Hollywood Great PS essay: paulschrader.org/articles/pdf... Must-read w/ @tnyfrontrow.bsky.social: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-... More @stephenrodrick.bsky.social: variety.com/2024/film/ne... @bilgeebiri.bsky.social: www.vulture.com/article/paul...

and www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, his bitter and faux-romantic vision of a petty man with delusions of greatness who justifies his self-serving killing spree as an upholder of culture and values—and of the world that takes him at face value—6:45pm at @paristheaternyc.bsky.social in 35mm.: