The First Time () also writer

Dec 9, 2013 — The critic and WCP executive director offers a personal take on art cinema and a primer on the project’s scope and mission.

Nov 25, 2013 — He massages, he gambles, and he’s great with a blade. Who is this blind swordsman, anyway?

Jan 16, 2013 — Both sparkling and suspenseful, Alfred Hitchcock’s benchmark thriller is the perfect getaway, and it set the scene for much of the master’s later work.

Nov 20, 2012 — For a brief, shining moment, the genteel Japanese studio mutated into a fun house of grim ghouls and slimy aliens.

Jun 27, 2012 — The warrior and philosopher protagonist of The Samurai Trilogy, Musashi Miyamoto, was a real-life seventeenth-century figure. Here, the translator of Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings tells us about this fascinating man and his principles of swordplay and spirituality.

Apr 27, 2009 — Stephen Frears’s gangland drama subverts its genre by removing its villains to an alternate mythic universe, that of the western, as its protagonists traverse the roads that snake through Spain’s arid hills and plains.

May 26, 2008 — Though producer Alexander Korda’s adventure movie forms part of a continued tradition of representing the East by purposefully occluding the reality of it, it celebrates the Arabian fantasy as a site of childlike wonder.

Jul 9, 2007 — Set almost entirely in a single house, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s eloquent collaboration with writer Kobo Abe shows both his powerful staging and his love of fine, almost microscopic, detail.

Apr 17, 2006 — In the absence of a finished, definitive edit of Orson Welles’s enigmatic project, three writers dive into the unsolvable mystery of the film and the different versions presented in the Criterion edition.

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