SHIFT

May 24, 2004 — By piling on naturalistic details to keep the heat constantly in our minds, Akira Kurosawa creates a visual and behavioral excess that highlights the fixation of his hero on retrieving his stolen gun.

May 9, 2004 — With his vibrant chronicle of an Oedipal revolt, Volker Schlöndorff captures the source novel’s singular recreation of the German past.

Feb 2, 2004 — A story about defeat and failure, Robert Bresson’s masterpiece is a milestone in the slow process of the liberation of postwar French cinema

Dec 30, 2003 — Akira Kurosawa was a man of his time, who participated fully in the artistic and intellectual world of Japan from the 1930s until his death in 1998. Although filmgoers may think of him in terms of the screen images he...

Sep 29, 2003 — Fassbinder had long dreamed of a “German Hollywood film.” He sought not only success with the audience, but also professionalism. The auteur film in its purest form is an attempt to abolish the division of labor: the filmmaker represents in...

Sep 29, 2003 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder dedicated his final energies to bringing the lost, gray years of postwar Germany back to life.

Aug 18, 2003 — The third installment in Ingmar Bergman’s trilogy about religious faith sees the auteur coming to terms with the pious rigidity and strangled emotional life of his own upbringing.

May 26, 2003 — Transcription of a speech given by long-time Derek Jarman collaborator and friend, actress Tilda Swinton

Apr 28, 2003 — François Truffaut’s short Antoine Doinel film exposes an entire universe of male adolescent experience.

Mar 24, 2003 — Straw Dogs turns on a woman’s rape, and one can’t blame pictures for depicting. But the film shows the woman, after some tart resistance, seeming to enjoy it, and this approaches the apex of what a delicate soul might call...