Feb 06 2026
Keith Waterhouse made a career out of noticing the things other people stepped over. The absurd phrase in a newspaper, the quiet pretensions of everyday life, the daydreams of someone desperate to escape an ordinary job, the rituals of pubs and offices, the peculiar language people use when they are trying to impress one another—all …
Jan 26 2026
Born in New York on January 26, Charles Marowitz became one of the most provocative figures in postwar theatre, building a career as a director, playwright, critic, teacher, adapter, and relentless challenger of theatrical convention. He spent much of his professional life questioning the assumption that famous plays should be treated as untouchable objects. For …
Jan 23 2026
Born on January 23, 1919, Hans Hass became one of the great pioneers of twentieth-century underwater exploration, helping transform the sea from a mysterious world glimpsed from boats into a place ordinary people could experience through photographs, films, books, and television. The Austrian biologist, diver, filmmaker, photographer, inventor, and environmental thinker spent decades exploring coral …
Jan 17 2026
Vietnamese cinema is far richer and more varied than international audiences sometimes realize. Its history encompasses wartime films made under extraordinarily difficult conditions, intimate rural dramas, postwar reflections, lush romantic films, martial-arts adventures, horror, queer cinema, family melodramas, independent productions, and some of Southeast Asia’s most accomplished contemporary art-house filmmaking. For decades, many Vietnamese films …
Jan 07 2026
Few national cinemas have influenced world filmmaking as deeply as Japan’s. From the precise domestic dramas of Yasujirō Ozu and the sweeping samurai films of Akira Kurosawa to Godzilla, Studio Ghibli, J-horror, yakuza thrillers, experimental cinema, and the intimate contemporary work of Hirokazu Kore-eda and Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, Japanese filmmakers have repeatedly reshaped what movies can …
Jan 07 2026
Spanish-language cinema stretches across continents, cultures, political histories, and radically different filmmaking traditions. A movie made in Franco-era Spain may have little in common with one from revolutionary Cuba, 1970s Chile, contemporary Argentina, rural Peru, or Mexico City—yet together these films form one of the richest bodies of cinema in the world. Directors working in …
Dec 28 2025
New Year’s Eve has everything a movie needs: anticipation, crowded parties, unexpected reunions, romantic possibilities, regrets about the year that is ending, and the irresistible feeling that life might somehow look different when the clock strikes twelve. It is no wonder filmmakers have returned to December 31 again and again. Some movies unfold almost entirely …
Dec 23 2025
On December 23, 1962, Trần Anh Hùng was born in Đà Nẵng, South Vietnam. Over the decades that followed, he would become one of the most internationally acclaimed filmmakers of Vietnamese origin, creating an unusually elegant body of work in which food, memory, desire, family, silence, landscape, and the smallest gestures of everyday life can …
Dec 18 2025
Born on December 18, 1913, Alfred Bester was never content to stay in one corner of the storytelling world. He wrote science fiction, superhero comics, radio dramas, television scripts, magazine journalism, and novels, moving between popular entertainment and literary experimentation with unusual ease. Yet Bester’s reputation rests largely on two extraordinary science-fiction novels: The Demolished …
Dec 13 2025
Christmas movies often invite us into impossibly perfect homes. Fires crackle in stone fireplaces, enormous meals emerge effortlessly from spotless kitchens, snow falls at exactly the right moment, and everyone seems to know how to decorate a tree without becoming tangled in the lights. Christmas in Connecticut had already figured out the joke in 1945. …
