Underworld

Dec 28, 2017 — Every year for eleven years now, at the height of list-making season, Kristin Thompson, David Bordwell, or both offer a welcome twist with an entry on the best films that have just turned ninety. This year, Thompson looks back on...

Nov 16, 2017 — One of the masters of the French crime film explains how the film-noir form serves as a convenient vehicle for exploring such elemental human themes as freedom and betrayal.

Aug 17, 2017 — Zhao Tao (Mountains May Depart) and Liao Fan (Black Coal, Thin Ice) are set to star in Jia Zhangke’s new film, Ash Is Purest White,” a project formerly known as “Money & Love,” reports Variety’s Elsa Keslassy. “An epic love...

Aug 12, 2017 — At Shadowplay, David Cairns has posted David Melville Wingrove’s tribute to Conchita Montenegro, whose career in theater and film took her around the world from the late 1920s through the mid-40s. Her “triumphant final film” would be the 1944 Spanish...

Aug 9, 2017 — New York. “Though Fire Island is the movie’s very recognizable locale, it is filmed in arcadianly remote aspects of sunlight, shade and water, and narrated simply on the solemn, picturesque, stark level of myth. . . . The world as...

Aug 7, 2017 — The Venice International Film Festival, whose seventy-fourth edition runs from August 30 through September 9, has not only revamped its site, it’s also added three films to its lineup. John Woo’s Manhunt will premiere Out of Competition. “A contemporary remake...

Jul 25, 2017 — Venice Days, “modeled on the prestigious Directors’ Fortnight of the Cannes Festival and promoted by the associations of Italian film directors and authors (Anac and 100autori),” has announced the lineup for its fourteenth edition, running from August 30 through September...

Jun 27, 2017 — After nearly a decade of honing his craft, Alfred Hitchcock firmly established his reputation with this silent thriller.

May 25, 2017 — “Sergei Loznitsa’s documentaries are conceived as silent commentary,” begins Jay Weissberg in Variety. “His rigorously edited, coolly composed shots contain all the information needed for viewers to feel the weight of his argument. By contrast, his fiction films (My Joy,...

Apr 2, 2017 — What defines noir acting? In her latest Dark Passages column, Imogen Sara Smith examines the stylistic variety in some of the genre’s most iconic male performances, including Burt Lancaster in The Killers and Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly.