In Darkness

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....

Jul 21, 2008 — Carl Theodor Dreyer’s elliptical and dreamlike vampire film defies definitive shots at interpretation.

Jan 21, 2008 — Agnès Varda seizes the kind of immediacy and tension associated, at the start of the sixties, with the cinema verité documentary movement and uses it to create a new form of fiction.

Mar 12, 2001 — This first-rate action thriller by Michael Bay is a triumph of style, tone, and energy.

Feb 27, 2018 — In a new episode of Observations on Film Art, film-studies scholar Kristin Thompson analyzes the lyrical techniques in Raymond Bernard’s brutal war drama Wooden Crosses.

Apr 22, 2025 — The majestic landscape of Provence takes center stage in Claude Berri’s two-film adaptation of an epic tale by Marcel Pagnol, a cinematic treasure that remains an abiding source of comfort for French viewers.

Feb 24, 2015 — Federico Fellini’s fragmentary and picturesque tale of death and debauchery in ancient Rome is a surreal take on reality.

Oct 15, 2024 — This jolt of delicious weirdness from Japanese New Wave master Masahiro Shinoda is both a reverent salute to Kabuki and a self-consciously postmodern take on its traditions.

Oct 11, 2023 — The shock of Davies’s passing is compounded by the sinking realization that cinema has lost one of its most singular artists.

Jan 3, 2020 — This week we’ve been reading about Orson Welles, Nina Menkes, Martin Scorsese, Luc Moullet, and the late Robert Frank.