10 Results
In Cold Blood: Structuring the Real
Richard Brooks’s In Cold Blood applied cinematic specificity and flair to the literary realism of Truman Capote’s classic “nonfiction novel.”
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul: One Love, Two Oppressions
People struggle to escape their socially dictated roles in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s moving, Douglas Sirk–inspired melodrama.
Riot in Cell Block 11: States of Exception
A real-life prison uprising inspired this two-fisted tale directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to make many more films about men in extreme situations.
Le cercle rouge: What Is the Red Circle?
Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: “When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever their diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come together in …
Excess in Stray Dog
Stray Dog is above all a film of atmosphere. The film establishes right away that it’s hot in Tokyo, and never lets us forget it for a second. By piling on naturalistic details to keep the heat constantly in our minds—fluttering fans, the mopping…
Love on the Run
While making Love on the Run, François Truffaut knew that it would be the end of the Antoine Doinel cycle. He also wanted the film to be the cycle’s recapitulation. Love on the Run prolongs Antoine’s adventures (or his “flight,” to recall th…
The Cranes Are Flying
The Soviet Union lost some ten percent of its prewar population in World War II. For years, Soviet cinema was able to represent this traumatic loss only within strict limits, in terms of glossy patriotic clichés about all-wise leaders and the necess…
The Time It Takes: Le Trou and Jacques Becker
With recent retrospectives and video releases of several films, the United States is in the midst of a Jacques Becker revival. The rediscovery of Becker is an unusual opportunity because Becker was never discovered to start with. He’s tended to be …
Häxan
Born in Denmark in 1879, Benjamin Christensen had a varied career before he entered the Danish film industry as an actor and writer in 1912. The first two films he directed, The Mysterious X (1913) and The Night of Revenge (1915), have a visual sophi…
Ordet
The strangeness of Ordet is something that no number of viewings, God willing, will rub off. I want to stress this strangeness. That Ordet is a great film, one of the greatest ever made, only a rash or foolish person will deny. But even less than wit…