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Movie Dates
Cinematic and carnal ravishment are sometimes at cross-purposes, as this celebrated American essayist discovered after many fumbled attempts at merging the two.

Only the Lonely: Maren Ade’s Squirm-Inducing Debut Feature
The director of Toni Erdmann burst onto the international festival circuit in 2003 with a piercing, unsettlingly funny look at the life of an idealistic schoolteacher.

Insiang: Slum Goddess
Lino Brocka brought an invigoratingly personal and socially conscious vision to Philippine cinema with this gritty portrait of Manila barrio life.

Speedy: The Comic Figure of the Average Man
In Speedy, Harold Lloyd, a comic genius who thought of himself as a quintessentially average American man, places his optimistic everyman character within the context of a society in shift, to great comedic effect.

Il sorpasso: The Joys of Disillusionment
A leading light of commedia all’italiana, Dino Risi specialized in fleet, satirical takes on contemporary Italian culture, and this road-trip smash was his most trenchant.

The Great Beauty: Dancing in Place
Rome is as exquisite as it is suffocating in Paolo Sorrentino’s profound tale of contemporary entropy.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie: The Raw and the Cooked
In John Cassavetes’s personal cinema, the director was always trying to break away from the formulas of Hollywood narrative, in order to uncover some fugitive truth about the way people behave. At the same time, he took seriously his responsibiliti…

Lonesome: Great City, Great Solitude
A frenetic portrait of New York as well as a love story, Paul Fejos’s film captures the odd sensation of being alone in the big city, even when in a crowd.

Tiny Furniture: Out There
Comedy evolves. We long ago bid adieu to the physical acrobatics of Buster Keaton, the wisecracks of Bob Hope, the witty repartee of Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. The now-reigning comedy of embarrassment, seen in the films of Judd Apatow and the Farrel…

Solaris: Inner Space
Andrei Tarkovsky belongs to that handful of filmmakers (Dreyer, Bresson, Vigo, Tati) who, with a small, concentrated body of work, created a universe. Though he made only seven features, thwarted by Soviet censors and then by cancer, each honored his…

L’enfance nue: The Fly in the Ointment
In his defiantly maverick directing career, which yielded only ten features in thirty-five years, Maurice Pialat (1925–2003) was a stimulant and irritant, agitating the cozy pool of French cinema. His first effort, the lyrically bitter short ess…

A Christmas Tale: The Inescapable Family
In the eight films he’s made since 1991, Arnaud Desplechin has been developing a visionary world, a personal style that goes against the grain of standard cinematic practice today. He’s a master of ensemble mise-en-scène and a brilliant director…
Mafioso: Meet the Badalamentis!
The 1960s were a heady time for Italian cinema. On the one hand, you had the postwar art-house powerhouses—Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Fellini, and Antonioni—all operating in full gear, with a younger crop (Pasolini, Zurlini, and Scola) bringi…
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs:They Endure
The posthumous international triumph of Mikio Naruse is one of the most unique corrections in film history. During his lifetime (1905–69), Naruse toiled away at his craft largely unsung, though respected by his peers, making more than eighty pictur…

La collectionneuse: Marking Time
La collectionneuse is a strong, sensuously lush, deceptively slight film, a riviera fruit with a bitter, uncompromising aftertaste.
Ugetsu: From the Other Shore
Often appearing on lists of the ten greatest films of all time, called one of the most beautiful films ever made, or the most masterful work of Japanese cinema, Ugetsu comes to us awash in superlatives. No less acclaimed has been its maker, Kenji Miz…

Scenes from a Marriage: Natural Antagonists
With uncharacteristic warmth and affection for human frailty, Ingmar Bergman raises the question of how love can possibly last forever.
Night and Fog
François Truffaut once called Night and Fog “the greatest film ever made.” If you don’t believe me, here is the exact quote: “The effective war film is often the one in which the action begins after the war, when there is nothing but ruins a…
Contempt: The Story of a Marriage
Contempt, one of Jean-Luc Godard’s greatest masterpieces, has a stately air that breaks with the filmmaker’s earlier, throwaway, hit-and-run manner, as though he were this time allowing himself to aim for cinematic sublimity. It is both his riche…
Gertrud
There is no other movie like Gertrud. It exists in its own bright, one-entry category, idiosyncratic, serenely stubborn, and sublime. When it opened in 1964, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s last film, one of his greatest, generated a scandal from which it h
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