A Day Off

Apr 30, 2009 — The following article, based on an interview with Nagisa Oshima conducted by Katsue Tomiyama in April 1983, first appeared, in slightly longer form, in the Japanese magazine Image Forum. Tomiyama is a film producer and cofounder of Image Forum, and...

Nov 27, 2008 — Despite Samuel Fuller’s career-long penchant for giving controversial subjects a punchy, exploitation-movie spin, his twenty-first feature was the first to suffer outright suppression.

Sep 15, 2008 — Max Ophuls’s ingenious tale of Viennese cafe society conveys both the transience of individual passions and the durability of passion itself as a motivating force in human behavior.

Oct 16, 2007 — Ididn’t create the Criterion office’s word-of-the-day bulletin board, but I’m the latest logophile to carry the torch, er, dry-erase marker and update the white board in the kitchen. Occasionally someone will ask me what a certain word means (psocid was...

Aug 23, 2004 — This drama about young dreamers is the first definitive plunge into many of Federico Fellini’s dominant thematic and imagistic preoccupations.

Aug 20, 2001 — Carl Dreyer’s modern tragedy eschews melodrama, striking a balance between suffering and triviality.

May 29, 2025 — The rise of fascism upended the childhoods of both filmmakers.

Jan 21, 2025 — Lynchian may be impossible to define, but you know it when you see it.

Dec 13, 2023 — Critics have come around on his turns in Barry Lyndon and The Driver, and toward the end, he started patching things up with his family.

Sep 14, 2023 — Male aggression threatens women’s lives in Kitty Green’s follow-up to The Assistant and Anna Kendrick’s debut feature.