The Hunt for Red October. DB here: Seminar, orig. German (1889): A class that meets for systematic study under the direction of a teacher. From Latin seminarium, “seed-plot.” I retired from full-time teaching in July of 2005. Since then, while...

Kristin here: So says director Guillermo del Toro in his self-deprecating lead-in to his audio commentary on the great Danish filmmaker’s 1932 classic, Vampyr. Fortunately he did not act on his words but goes on to give an erudite, often personal...

Donald Richie is in a Tokyo hospital recuperating from pneumonia. If you’ve read a book on Japanese cinema or listened to a Criterion commentary, you probably know his voice. And if you admire Ozu or Kurosawa or Mizoguchi or Kinoshita or Oshima or...

DB here: If you wanted a prototype of some unique visual pleasures of 1930s cinema, you could do worse than pick this innocuous image. It’s perfunctory in narrative terms, merely telling us that Sylvia Day is calling on Bill Smith. Beyond its plot...

One of several posters the Stenberg brothers designed for Miss Mend. We’ve been quite busy in the tail end of October. David sweated over a Bresson essay, started on his online version of Planet Hong Kong, and continued to help out in Lea Jacobs’...