Jan 30, 2026

For the second part of our Delphine Seyrig Acteurist Spotlight we disregarded chronology to discuss two intensely experimental Marguerite Duras films, India Song (1975) and Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977). We enumerate Duras' peculiarities as a writer and filmmaker and their effects in these studies of sexual and...

Jan 23, 2026

In this episode we revisit three Technicolor melodramas made by British cinema's great auteur duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, bursting with vibrant emotions and sensuality that exercise a dangerous allure over their protagonists: Clive Candy, the upper-class colonialist twerp played by Roger Livesey in The...

Jan 16, 2026

This week's 1933 Fox Film Studios Year by Year episode paradoxically digs into the Hollywood beginnings of a couple of Paramount powerhouses via William Dieterle's Adorable, a musical based on a German operetta co-written by Billy Wilder (who'd be writing for Fox directly by 1934), and William K. Howard's The Power and...

Jan 9, 2026

Our Acteur Spotlight kicks off with six movies starring Delphine Seyrig, beginning this episode with Alain Resnais' Muriel (1963) and Marguerite Duras' debut as a feature film director, La Musica (1967) (co-directed with Paul Seban). We find that these two films about former couples discussing, debating, and...

Jan 2, 2026

This week's Warner Brothers 1933 Studios Year by Year episode brings the studio-as-auteur question back into focus with two highly distinctive Pre-Code musicals with a similarity of style and social outlook that can't be attributed to the directors, screenwriters, source material, or the presence of Hollywood's...