Author Shari Kizirian

It begins like any good spy thriller should, with a fast-paced action-filled set up, here done in a style so clipped and cryptic it leaves us breathless. That there’s a confession in the first few minutes only ...

Variety’s correspondent in Berlin describes the unfortunate fate of Prix de beauté (Augusto Genina, 1930), a film about a beauty queen saddled with a jealous boyfriend, released during the mad rush to sound: “O...

A 1923 American release about a scrappy street singer who catches the eye of a lascivious king in a fictional Old Seville, Rosita was a turning point in the careers of two of silent-era cinema’s most consequent...

The breathless immediacy of Voskhozhdeniye (The Ascent, Larisa Shepitko, 1977), adapted from a novella by Vasily Bykov about two Belarusian partisans during World War II, combines with a profound understanding ...

Light on plot and heavy in atmosphere, Asphalt (Joe May, 1929) was one of the last silent films to come out of Ufa, and the German mega-studio seems to have spared no expense in its making. The story of a young...

The first solo effort by Boris Barnet, Devushka s korobkoy (The Girl with the Hatbox) opened during a pinnacle year for silent cinema. Called “annus mirabilis” by Kevin Brownlow (1), 1927 saw the premieres of M...

In 1926, the October Revolution Jubilee Committee pulled Sergei Eisenstein, Grigorii Aleksandrov, and cameraman Eduard Tisse away from Generalnaia Liniia (The General Line, eventually completed in 1929) to begi...

From Failed Propaganda to Timeless Masterpiece: Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) In 1927 while Soviet cinema was celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, one of its most ferve...

Made the year exhibitor William Fox established himself as a moviemaker, Regeneration (Raoul Walsh, 1915) was released as part of the company’s ambitious plan for filling its 125-movie-theater chain with its ow...

Motion pictures get made in a tensile tradeoff between art and commerce, expression and resources, creator and investor, and most elementally both on-set and behind-the-scenes, between director and producer. So...

When Hollywood came calling to sign both Ingrid Bergman and Gustaf Molander for a remake of Intermezzo (1936), the actress and the director’s reluctance was probably no surprise, considering MGM’s famous diffic...

A black sheep with blonde hair, Patsy Harrington has a crush. The younger sister of the social-climbing Grace who, abetted by a single-minded mother and a weak-willed father, always gets her way, Patsy is the f...