The Great Dictator

Mar 30, 2017 — Released in 1973, near the end of General Franco’s military dictatorship, Víctor Erice’s strikingly poetic first film, The Spirit of the Beehive, reflects on the earliest days of the regime, depicting the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in an...

Nov 7, 2025 — Ira Sachs’s new film opens this week, plus: Joy Williams on Gene Hackman and Claire Atherton’s work with Chantal Akerman.

Jul 10, 2019 — En route to the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the summer of 2006, I stopped off for some sightseeing in Prague. Having dutifully made the rounds of the city’s hopping tourist spots, I retreated to my bare-bones hotel...

Mar 15, 2018 — New York. Film Forum’s series, entitled simply Michel Piccoli, opens tomorrow and runs through March 22. “It’s surprisingly hard to think of an American equivalent for Piccoli,” writes Mike D’Angelo in the Village Voice. “He never exudes the wised-up, electrifying...

Aug 24, 2010 — Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928) was first and foremost a star vehicle for Emil Jannings, the internationally known, Swiss-born actor, who had left Germany in October 1926 to work for Paramount Pictures. During his two and a half...

Oct 25, 2012 — The following piece by Sunday Bloody Sunday screenwriter Penelope Gilliatt originally appeared as the introduction to the 1971 U.S. publication of the script. A friend of mine who had started scrubbing at fourteen and went on to be a barmaid...

Jun 25, 2022 — This week sees new issues of film and literary journals as well as great writing on Stanley Kwan, Hong Sangsoo, and Claire Denis.

Mar 15, 2022 — A captivatingly unclassifiable leading man in the 1980s, Hurt often returned to his first passion—the theater.

Apr 5, 2018 — Locarno in Los Angeles, the series curated by Acropolis Cinema founder Jordan Cronk and co-artistic director Robert Koehler that brings a batch of the best films screened last summer at the increasingly vital Swiss festival, opens today and runs through...

Aug 15, 2017 — “Given that this edition of Locarno was its 70th, it was a shame that no special anniversary prize was created and bestowed on Raúl Ruíz's gloriously strange The Wandering Soap Opera,” finds James Lattimer at the House Next Door. “The...