Arrest

Oct 25, 2009 — Costa-Gavras’s 1969 political assassination thriller Z appeared at the end of a decade of burgeoning cultural change and rampant paranoia. In the United States, this Algerian-French coproduction sparked a sensation, not just relaying the European political crisis but perfectly capturing...

Mar 30, 2009 — Among the great Polish filmmakers—Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Zanussi, Agnieszka Holland, Roman Polanski—Andrzej Wajda stands out as the one most concerned with national identity and memory.

Dec 21, 2008 — In 1962, Roberto Rossellini called a press conference in a bookshop in Rome and announced that the cinema was dead. “There’s a crisis not just in film but culture as a whole,” he explained. Increasingly, Rossellini had understood the great...

Mar 27, 2006 — Louis Malle’s World War II–era drama follows a young collaborationist in rural France and asks how people with no interest in politics become active participants in brutal torture.

Mar 27, 2006 — Louis Malle’s coming-of-age drama offers an unusually full and individualized characterization of a boy whose yearnings, sensitivities, and fantasies outstrip his personality.

Jan 5, 2006 — A gray flannel ghost story in which the living haunt the dead, the least appreciated of Akira Kurosawa’s midperiod collaborations with Toshiro Mifune throws open the windows of Japanese corporate corruption.

Sep 13, 2004 — This oblique strategy can be seen as a self-referential characterization of Slacker itself: it appears to have no struc­ture, to be chaotic (a matter of random encounters), when, in fact, it has a very subtle, extremely well-crafted structure that makes...

Aug 4, 2003 — Shohei Imamura’s lurid black comedy showcases the director’s passion for everything that’s kinky, lowlife, or irrational in Japanese culture.

May 26, 2003 — Embracing the world while pretending to sneer at it, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s crime film is rich, deep, and wily.

Mar 10, 2003 — Vilgot Sjöman’s cultural-sexual sensation sparked much critical and popular mayhem, only to be consigned to nearly instantaneous oblivion.