The Vargas Blog

  Wieland Wagner ushered in the era of the director in opera with the reopening of the Bayreuth Festival in 1951.   His historic p...

 When I heard Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival this summer, I wrote on this blog that the experience was like listening to the work for...

When militants stormed the United States embassy in Tehran in 1979 in retaliation for the U.S. sheltering the deposed Shah of Iran, more t...

When Dr. King Schultz ( Christoph Waltz ) learns that the slave Django ( Jamie Foxx ) is married to a woman named Broomhilda ( Kerry Washi...

Lincoln begins with a chaotic battle from the middle of the Civil War: brother against brother in hand-to hand butchery.  A scene that re...

The Philarmonia Orchestra under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen visited New York City earlier this week and presented two performances at...

When The Tempest , Thomas Adès 's opera based on Shakespeare 's play of the same name, premiered at the Royal Op...

In Robert Zemeckis 's excellent new film Flight , Denzel Washington portrays Captain Whip Whitaker, an airline pilot whose experience...

I've begun to dread the words "a brilliant new restoration," or "a brilliant new 35 millimeter print," when it com...

I'm watching the UK release of the latest restoration of David Lean 's Lawrence of Arabia on Blu-Ray, and I have to report that I...

Last year the New York Film Festival presented a stunning restoration of 1959's Ben Hur .  Watching it on the screen for the second t...

Beyond the Hills ( După Dealuri ) , Christian Mungiu 's outstanding new film dramatizes real life events that occurred less than a d...

While Life of Pi takes pleasure in showing us the toll of the sea on a shipwrecked boy, Amour , the winner of the Palme d'Or at this ...

The 50th New York Film Festival began with Ang Lee 's new film Life of Pi , based on the bestselling novel by Yann Martel .  The film...

The Dinosaur and the Baby is a documentary film by André S. Labarthe from 1964 that paired the legendary Austrian film director Fritz Lang...

The title of Paul Thomas Anderson' s new film The Master, a thinly disguised examination of the career of L. Ron Hubbard, the aut...

A year after it was announced that Richard Peña would be leaving his post as program director and head of the selection committee at the ...

The August 11 performance of Parsifal that I attended at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus was filmed and shown in Europe on the Arte Network ....

-->  Parsifal , a work that in 1882 Richard Wagner labeled a “Stage-consecrating Festival Drama,” was never to be heard outsi...

After the first act of Tannhäuser finished, I stepped outside and filmed the following video. Be sure that that hopeful smile on my fa...