Picture This

Apr 27, 2016 — In Phoenix, Christian Petzold sets his nuanced melodrama of postwar German-Jewish identity within a starkly realist aesthetic, making newly fascinating use of his enduring interest in the tensions between the real and the artificial.

Aug 18, 2014 — The filmmaker and critic discuss the pleasures and provocations of the Spanish auteur’s work.

Feb 19, 2007 — For a director whose vision is so frequently called pessimistic, Mikio Naruse’s drama exhibits a lightness of touch, deft and coolly understated, like its cocktail jazz score.

Jan 5, 2006 — Akira Kurosawa appreciated Shake­speare’s knack for linking the private and the political, threading a tale of corruption and revenge through a tangle of blood ties.

Oct 24, 2005 — The hero in Masahiro Shinoda’s popular samurai movie is both a genre figure and an ordinary character, both killer and savior, both larger than life and lost in the mists.

Jul 3, 2024 — Pop Shakespeare, 100 years of Disney, and conversations with Isaac Julien and Steven Soderbergh are among this week’s highlights.

Jul 30, 2021 — First: conscious neglect and budget cuts are threatening cinema’s legacy. Then: this week’s highlights.

Feb 1, 2018 — This Saturday, the Pickford Film Center in Washington presents a screening of Edward Yang’s four-hour coming-of-age epic A Brighter Summer Day.

Mar 12, 2013 — Working in America, German master Fritz Lang contributed to the anti-Nazi effort with this nightmarish, surreal tale of espionage.

Jan 5, 2004 — “Sometimes I think of my death,” Kurosawa has written: “I think of ceasing to be . . . and it is from these thoughts that Ikiru came.” The story of a man who knows he is going to die, the...