The Motive

Dec 5, 2005 — René Clément’s masterpiece is dedicated to the radical Freudian proposal that living matter seeks the comfort of oblivion.

Jul 14, 2026 — On October 30, 1992, the Provisional Irish Republican Army set off two bombs as part of an ongoing campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland. One, a small explosive planted alarmingly close to the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing...

Dec 12, 2017 — Alexander Payne skewers the absurdities of American politics in this tale of a high-school presidential campaign gone ugly.

Nov 29, 2017 — The Sundance Film Festival, whose 2018 edition will run from January 18 through 28, has announced the lineups for its U.S. Dramatic and Documentary Competitions, World Cinema Dramatic and Documentary Competitions, and its Next, Spotlight, Premieres, Documentary Premieres, Midnight, and...

Oct 6, 2017 — “After a number of impressive short films and one documentary hybrid feature, the 2013 Tonight and the People, French artist Neïl Beloufa offers Occidental, the closest he’s yet come to a conventional feature film,” begins Michael Sicinski, writing for Cinema...

Mar 4, 2014 — The great documentarian Claude Lanzmann’s new movie, made from footage he didn’t use in Shoah, provides a fascinating glipse at the way he began that monumental project.

Jan 18, 2011 — In his Life Studies poem “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” Robert Lowell wrote of “free-lancing out along the razor’s edge,” a lean, glamorous, tense phrasing that invokes the Samuel Fuller of the early sixties—a director suddenly without...

Apr 14, 2026 — Consider, for a moment, the jewel thief. No, not like the gang that, at the time of this writing, recently robbed the Louvre in Paris, France. Think rather of one you might find in Paris, Paramount. After all, as director...

Jul 12, 2022 — In David Lean’s Venice-set romance, a fleeting love affair prompts a woman’s self-exploration.

Apr 19, 2022 — Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist fable deploys barbed humor and surreal flourishes to depict class solidarity and human kindness in postwar Italy.