Ian Christie

Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov explored his Transcaucasian roots in this visually spectacular and wonderfully strange ode to the Armenian poet Sayat-Nova.

"Afilm about India without elephants and tiger hunts”—this was how Jean Renoir described his objective in making The River. Guided by Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel, he rejected the India of exotic action and spectacle to make a meditati…

Coward and Lean? It may not sound as natural as Launder and Gilliat or Powell and Pressburger, perhaps because we don’t instinctively think of Noël Coward as a filmmaker or of David Lean as part of a team. But they were the key creative figures in…

Andrea Arnold seemed to emerge out of nowhere with Red Road (2006), her revelatory, shrewdly observed debut feature about voyeurism and sexual revenge. That film won Arnold multiple awards, and she had already earned an Oscar for her short Wasp (20…

To say that Lars von Trier deals in provocation and controversy is like saying John Ford made westerns: obviously true, but far from giving a measure of the director’s importance. Ever since The Element of Crime polarized critics at Cannes in 19…

Before the Rain brought a vision of “Balkan conflict” to the world that caused a sensation in the mid-1990s, winning the Golden Lion in Venice and an Academy Award nomination. Five years of increasingly horrific news from the former Yugoslavia, w

Britain’s heraldic coat of arms features two creatures, a lion and a unicorn, which have often been taken to symbolize the qualities of strength and imagination. As Britain stood on the threshold of a long-dreaded war in 1939, Alexander Korda decid

Why would a filmmaker simply film an opera? Many admirers of Michael Powell’s have assumed that the decision to make The Tales of Hoffmann, in 1950, was in some way an admission by Powell and his long-term partner, Emeric Pressburger, that they cou

By any standard, The Horse’s Mouth shines as an outstandingly personal work from a decade that often seems the most arid in British cinema.

The Ruling Class may not be recognized as a neglected masterpiece—at least, not yet. But if we remember how long it took for Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons and Renoir’s Rules of the Game to be recognized as supreme anatomies of social uneas

I Know Where I’m Going! is a love story that is also a fable. Joan Webster thinks she knows exactly where she’s going: to marry the richest industrialist in Britain. But when the elements stop her from reaching a remote Scottish island where the

Before The Red Shoes, there were films with dance numbers. After it, there was a new medium which combined dance, design, and music in a dreamlike spectacle. Hollywood musicals were quick to pay tribute—An American in Paris was the most obviously i…