New MUBI Posts

I have two new pieces up at The Daily Notebook... 1.) A tribute to the great cinematographer Harris Savides (Van Sant's Death Trilogy, ...

An Evening With Vampyr (Dreyer/1932) and Steven Severin

From the vantage point of a semi-jaded soon-to-be graduate of film school, Carl Dreyer's Vampyr embodies a film-school surrealist's...

Babies Again: Romance Games in It Happened One Night (Capra/1934) and The Awful Truth (McCarey/1937)

“You know this is the first time in years I’ve ridden piggy back,” ponders Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) to Peter Warne (Clark Gable) in...

New World(s)

“But how can renewal come about?—the perennial question of reformers and revolutionaries, of anyone who wants to start over, who wants anoth...

Bringing Up Baby (1938) A Film by Howard Hawks

In Bringing Up Baby , Howard Hawks delights in introducing zany element after zany element, an accumulation of absurd details so overwhelmin...

Screening Notes #14

It Happened One Night (1934): What I find so propulsive about It Happened One Night is its structure more than anything (though the chemis...

Stanley Kubrick, Ranked

( This is the third entry in the Favorite Directors Blogathon . Next month is Andrei Tarkovsky. ) For what it's worth, I've had more...