60 Years Ago: Dr. Zhivago in Madrid
Halfway through filming Lawrence of Arabia in Jordan, producer Sam Spiegel ordered David Lean to move the production to Spain. Costs were mounting as the crew battled sandstorms and other challenges of filming in the remote desert. Spain, which had already hosted several large Hollywood productions, had some key advantages […]
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Miami Art Week 2025
Treading water a few hundred feet offshore from Miami Beach seems an unusual way to view an art installation. On Sunday morning, at the tail end of Miami Art Week, I ventured out with the Dolphins and Rainbows open water swim group (accompanied by Olympic swimmer and ‘eco-mermaid’ Merle Liivand) […]
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The Library of Us
Day and night throughout Miami Art Week, Es Devlin’s installation The Library of Us drew crowds to the beach behind the Faena hotel. An enormous, metal tower of bookshelves, set in the middle of a reflective pool, rotates like a sundial. A scrolling LED panel displays an assortment of bookish […]
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Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair
Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, the full uncut version of Quentin Tarantino’s epic, finally gets its theatrical release this week, more than two decades after the original release of Volume 1. Executive producer Harvey Weinstein had deemed the film too long, and Tarantino opted to divide it into two […]
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The Films that Franco Saw
This week marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Francisco Franco, the Generalísimo who ruled Spain as a dictator for four decades. The moment has triggered a flood of commentary regarding his legacy and profound impact on 20th-century Spain, including effects that linger today. Perhaps less known is that […]
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The Demolition of Carabanchel
“Carabanchel está grabado a fuego en la piel moral de todos los españoles.” Juan Antonio Ramírez, Carabanchel: el templo de la memoria Under cover of darkness, one night in late October 2008, an excavator began tearing at the walls of the Carabanchel prison. The enormous complex, constructed in the 1940s, […]
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Almería Western Film Festival 2025
The Almería Western Film Festival is a unique kind of film forum. Hosted by the town of Tabernas, the festival celebrates both the Western genre and the local legacy of filmmaking. The surrounding desert landscape has appeared in countless movies over the years, particularly Westerns, including, of course, Sergio Leone’s […]
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Dead Souls
Alex Cox’s new film ‘Dead Souls‘ is now making the festival circuit. Loosely based on Nikolai Gogol’s novel of the same name, the protagonist, named Strindler (and played by Cox himself), travels through the American southwest seeking to buy the names and details of Mexicans who have died while encountering […]
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Claudia Cardinale in Almería
In Sergio Leone’s epic ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (1968), Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale) arrives at Sweetwater Ranch after a long journey by train and horse-drawn carriage through the Western landscape (including some shots of Monument Valley). She plans to join her new husband and his children, but […]
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Robert Redford and Spain
Robert Redford would have been a natural fit for a western or war film made in Spain in the 1960s. He never did make a film in Spain, but he lived there for a while early in his career, staying in Mallorca and Malaga. At the time, he was trying […]
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