Moonrise: Dark of the Moon
In his uncharacteristic final masterpiece, the great Hollywood melodramatist Frank Borzage approaches the shadowy violence of film noir with his unique brand of romanticism.
Downhill: Playing for the Old Boys
Alfred Hitchcock brings a spirit of cinematic ingenuity to a thin narrative, resulting in a flawed but fascinating film that contains one of the most virtuosic sequences in his filmography.
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog: The First True Hitchcock Movie
After nearly a decade of honing his craft, Alfred Hitchcock firmly established his reputation with this silent thriller.
Charulata: “Calm Without, Fire Within”
Satyajit Ray’s delicate masterpiece about forbidden love in the late nineteenth century is lovingly adapted from a novella by the great Rabindranath Tagore.
The Ballad of Narayama: Abandonment
Keisuke Kinoshita’s most experimental film is a resplendent, kabuki-inspired, folk-derived drama about mortality.
Shallow Grave: A Film Called Cruel
Tasteful British cinema got a refreshing dose of amorality with Danny Boyle’s stylish and violent tale of greed and paranoia.
The Music Room: Distant Music
Au revoir les enfants: Childhood’s End
“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
…A Time of Honor: Seven Samurai and Sixteenth-Century Japan
With Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa set out to debunk some of the more inflated myths that had attached themselves to the samurai.
Night Train to Munich: A Last Laugh
The Human Condition: The Prisoner
Masaki Kobayashi’s towering antiwar saga embodies the postwar Japanese conscience by tracing the moral degradation of a principled dissident.
Kind Hearts and Coronets: Ealing’s Shadow Side
Robert Hamer’s witty, ironic tale of calculating serial killer breaks the beloved mold of the Ealing comedy.
Casque d’or: Tenderness and Violence
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.
Touchez pas au grisbi: A Neglected Master
Jacques Becker’s crime film contains plenty of the requisite genre elements—double-crossings, violence, kidnappings, and gun battles—but it’s also a pensive meditation on age, friendship, and lost opportunities.