By: Annie Nocenti

The life and films of ROMAN POLANSKI (born 1933) in turn foreshadow, stalk and haunt each other. His films seem apolitical, but the claustrophobia of his childhood — in the Kraków Ghetto, surrounded by barbed […]

By: Jason Grote

ALFRED HITCHCOCK (1899-1980) was schooled in the genre conventions of the English Murder Mystery and the Hollywood Thriller, and his primary goal was always to entertain. A legendary control freak, he invented some of cinema’s […]

By: Peggy Nelson

Known as “that ugly girl who can’t dance,” NORMA SHEARER (1902-83) was a self-made urchin who became the Queen of (Pre-Code) Hollywood, personifying the “she’s gotta have it” ethos. Stylish, independent, and opinionated, her characters […]

By: David Smay

Most Western filmgoers didn’t discover the greatest female action star in the history of film until Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — or when she blew Pierce Brosnan off the screen in Tomorrow Never Dies. But […]

By: Joe Alterio

By: Greg Rowland

JAMES WHALE (1889-1957) was born in England’s industrial Black Country. Here’s a typical gag from those parts: An old left-wing activist is on his death bed. He announces that he’s joined the Conservative Party. His […]

By: David Smay

Moving from Shanghai to Hong Kong at age five, WONG KAR-WAI (born 1958) learned to speak Cantonese at the movies. He hustled his way into the Hong Kong film boom of the ’80s, screenwriting hackwork […]

By: Lynn Peril

Clad in a leather jumpsuit, tiny waist offset by enormous bosom, her performance in Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) transformed what could have been a run-of-the-mill B-movie into a parable of female power […]

By: Ingrid Schorr

Playing twins who change places, a teenager who swaps bodies with her mother, and a couple of appealing outcasts who find a way in, LINDSAY LOHAN (born 1986) once portrayed duality with an irresistible coarseness. […]

By: Jason Grote

My heart still skips a beat when I look at old Rolling Stone photos of GILDA RADNER (1946-89), an early childhood crush and, then as now, one of America’s greatest comediennes — and it still […]

By: Joshua Glenn

From Abbott, the courtly assassin in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, to the un-manly yet indefatigable Joel Cairo, in The Maltese Falcon, PETER LORRE (1904-64) mocked or otherwise subverted the very concept of […]

By: Greg Rowland

While it’s conventional to call Oliver Hardy a “straight man,” it would be more accurate to think of the character created by British comic actor STAN LAUREL (1890- 1965) as the duo’s “curved man.” Though […]

By: Peggy Nelson

Filmmaker CHANTAL AKERMAN (born 1950), the arthouse precursor to Charlie Kaufman, Jem Cohen, and even Sam Mendes, took one small step for a woman, and one giant leap into interstitial space, with her investigations of […]

By: Mimi Lipson

With his casual athleticism and big white teeth, with his good-looking features that somehow fail to coalesce into good looks, BRUCE DERN (born 1936) is the dropout personified — the kid who had every advantage […]

By: Joe Alterio

PAM GRIER (b. 1949) was the Joan of Arc of late-night UHF-TV, when such a thing still existed. Starting with The Big Dollhouse (1971), a film which absolutely must be seen on drugs to be […]