Before the Rain

May 27, 2014 — Howard Hawks was both a skillful Hollywood craftsman and a deeply personal artist, and this western of uncommon wit and grandeur is among his greatest and quirkiest films.

Nov 12, 2013 — Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig create a luminous, romantic portrait of a young woman looking for fulfillment in New York City.

Sep 17, 2013 — The author sheds some light on the fascinating life of the American scriptwriter behind Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan.

Jun 11, 2013 — Ingmar Bergman’s classic character study is a moving depiction of aging and regret but also joy and forgiveness.

Jun 10, 2011 — Bringing Junichiro Tanizaki’s sprawling, elegiac histor­ical novel The Makioka Sisters (1948) to the screen would seem an undertaking tailor-made for Kon Ichikawa. The renowned writer’s work was familiar territory for the veteran director, who had adapted the quirky Tanizaki novella...

Sep 21, 2010 — This is an expanded version of a piece that appeared in the original 2004 Criterion DVD release of Charade. Stanley Donen’s Charade occupies a special place among sixties thrillers. In an era of spy films resplendent with macho-driven eroticism (the...

Aug 19, 2009 — I Am Waiting: Port of Call The year: 1957. The city: Yokohama, not far from the piers. The sound of the tide softly lapping against stones in the darkness, cubes of black ice in a tumbler of foam. Night. Rain....

Oct 6, 2008 — It is pretty much a convention of the hard-boiled gangster picture that most, if not all, of the principal characters wind up dead by the final shot. So it ought not constitute a “spoiler” to note that Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le...

Feb 18, 2008 — At the climax of Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), a helicopter descends from the night sky onto a plaza where the colonial buildings are ablaze and an army of mercenaries is disintegrating . . .

Apr 16, 2007 — Jules Dassin’s noir is arguably the meatiest and most resonant prison film ever made in Hollywood, drawing explicit parallels to the Nazi encampment experience.