The Master

Jan 25, 2009 — Conventional wisdom once held that any European film worth seeing passed through the New York Film Festival. Still, when I first began reviewing movies for the Village Voice in the late seventies, there were some legendary exceptions: Tarkovsky’s The Mirror,...

Nov 19, 2008 — Albert Lamorisse’s principled balancing of objective fact with childish wish fulfillment results in a new, paradoxical genre—the documentary of dreams.

Nov 6, 2008 — In Rashomon, there may be four plausible versions of the murder, but when Academy Film Archive director Michael Pogorzelski began overseeing a brand-new digital restoration of the film, he could locate only two usable prints. In a special NPR podcast,...

Jul 21, 2008 — Carl Theodor Dreyer’s elliptical and dreamlike vampire film defies definitive shots at interpretation.

Sep 13, 2004 — This oblique strategy can be seen as a self-referential characterization of Slacker itself: it appears to have no struc­ture, to be chaotic (a matter of random encounters), when, in fact, it has a very subtle, extremely well-crafted structure that makes...

Sep 29, 2003 — In May 1981, in the midst of shooting Lola, Rainer Werner Fassbinder sketched out his next film project: Sybille Schmitz. On the cover, he had written, “Story for a Feature Film*.” The asterisk pointed to this footnote: “It is possible...

Oct 15, 2001 — Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller features two of Hollywood’s greatest stars, rendering their characters' grand romance in all its passion and perversity.

Jan 7, 1985 — King Kong is unique in motion picture history. In the 51 years since its original release, its particular combination of unbridled imagination and ingenious craftsmanship have never been equalled. Not only has it stood the test of time, but King...

Jan 12, 2018 — One of the greatest works of Cuban cinema returns for a theatrical run at New York City’s Film Forum this week.

Oct 18, 2018 — Separated by more than a decade in Ingmar Bergman’s filmography, these two formally masterful dramas uncover the ugliness of male aggression and brutality.