To the Stars

Oct 6, 2007 — In Gus Van Sant’s first feature, gayness—blind, unembarrassed homosexual lust—is the narrative’s driving force.

Jun 11, 2007 — Claude Berri’s witty comedy-drama depicts Nazi sympathizers with three-dimensional candor, neither whitewashing nor apologizing for their misguided ideas.

Feb 19, 2007 — A powerful document of anti-Nazi propaganda, Powell and Pressburger’s war drama consolidated their partnership and showed a way forward for British cinema.

Dec 4, 2006 — William Greaves’s masterpiece uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary.

Oct 24, 2005 — Kihachi Okamoto’s subversion of the samurai movie possesses the same gritty, stark realism with regard to imagery and body count, yet the tone is decidedly comic.

Nov 15, 2004 — Short Cuts is an L.A. jazz rhapsody that represents Robert Altman at an all-time personal peak—and it came at just the right time in his career.

Jun 21, 2004 — Indefatigably productive, ingenious, exasperating, narcissistically didactic, slyly self-promoting, abject, generous, exploitative, devoted to the wretched of the earth with honest fervor and deluded romanticism: Pier Paolo Pasolini can easily exhaust the adjective-prone, as man and artist, his person and his...

Aug 18, 2003 — The two versions of Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist romance offer case studies in Hollywood and European sensibilities as they existed in the early 1950s.

Apr 15, 2002 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s first-class crime picture may be the most elegantly rigorous movie ever made about a cockeyed heist.

Feb 14, 2002 — Robert Bresson’s second feature is fixed in history as one of the movies that heralded an austere, modernistic way of seeing and feeling.