Philip Kemp

In his uncharacteristic final masterpiece, the great Hollywood melodramatist Frank Borzage approaches the shadowy violence of film noir with his unique brand of romanticism.

After nearly a decade of honing his craft, Alfred Hitchcock firmly established his reputation with this silent thriller.

Satyajit Ray’s delicate masterpiece about forbidden love in the late nineteenth century is lovingly adapted from a novella by the great Rabindranath Tagore.

Keisuke Kinoshita’s most experimental film is a resplendent, kabuki-inspired, folk-derived drama about mortality.

Tasteful British cinema got a refreshing dose of amorality with Danny Boyle’s stylish and violent tale of greed and paranoia.

“Do you realize,” muses the twelve-year-old Julien Quentin, rapt in the solipsism of early adolescence, “that there’ll never be another January 17, 1944? Never again? . . . I’m the only one in this school who thinks about death. It’s i

There’s an old Chinese curse that runs, “May you live in interesting times.” And sixteenth-century Japan was certainly an interesting time from a dramatic point of view—which is undoubtedly why Akira Kurosawa chose it as Seven Samurai’s

Masaki Kobayashi’s towering antiwar saga embodies the postwar Japanese conscience by tracing the moral degradation of a principled dissident.

Robert Hamer’s witty, ironic tale of calculating serial killer breaks the beloved mold of the Ealing comedy.

Along with Touchez pas au grisbi and Le Trou, Casque d’or is now widely recognized as the summit of Jacques Becker’s achievement as a filmmaker.

Jacques Becker may well be the most seriously underestimated director in the history of French cinema. Even in his own lifetime, he suffered disparaging comments. Wrote Jacques Demeure about Touchez pas au grisbi in a 1957 Positif article: “Here we