Adventures in Moviegoing

Alan Cumming

Tony-winning actor, director, activist, and bon vivant Alan Cumming is known for both his chameleonic performances (this is a man, after all, who has played every role in “Macbeth”) and charmingly irreverent wit. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, the stage and screen star sits down with Criterion president Peter Becker to discuss everything from Scottish-cinema rarities to the reasons why he’s decidedly antiauteurist to the films he loves dearly. The selections he’s chosen—including Orson Welles’s trickster metadocumentary F FOR FAKE, Charlie Chaplin’s audacious political satire THE GREAT DICTATOR, and Volker Schlöndorff’s surreal antiwar statement THE TIN DRUM—display the same slyly subversive spirit he brings to his own work.