The Moment

Sep 15, 2008 — Max Ophuls’s ingenious tale of Viennese cafe society conveys both the transience of individual passions and the durability of passion itself as a motivating force in human behavior.

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.

Nov 19, 2007 — Ingmar Bergman made some outstanding films before Sawdust and Tinsel (1953). But that film, released in America under the meretricious title The Naked Night—and known in Sweden as The Clown’s Evening—was the first that no other director could have made....

Aug 13, 2007 — Cría cuervos . . . , Carlos Saura's political and psychological masterpiece, was shot in the summer of 1975, as Spanish dictator Francisco Franco lay dying, and premiered in Madrid's Conde Duque Theatre, on January 26, 1976, forty years after...

Jun 25, 2007 — Chris Marker’s masterpiece is a cinematic essay and travel film made up of asides and digressions that form a portrait of late twentieth-century civilization.

Jul 24, 2006 — Powell and Pressberger’s poignant work captures the fulfillment and absolute sameness of the everyday and the sacred.

Aug 22, 2005 — This delicate, fascinating film is self-consciously, almost militantly, naive, and it remains something of an anomaly in Roberto Rossellini’s body of work.

Jan 10, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki's penultimate film for Nikkatsu is a subversively funny account of the making of a model fascist.

Sep 8, 1998 — Paul Verhoeven’s breakthrough American film gleefully satirizes the Reagan era’s pet doctrines of free enterprise and privatization.

Jan 5, 1993 — All right, I’ll just say it. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the most sublimely irreverent, most jaw-droppingly hysterical movie of the last twenty years. How many films, after all, have Knights who say “Ni!,” filth-eating peasants, and 160...