The Return

Sep 26, 2017 — The sexual pedagogy of a masochistic music instructor takes center stage in this shocking study of art, control, and repression.

Sep 17, 2017 — Matteo Garrone’s gritty portrait of the Neapolitan Mafia draws on a lineage of Italian crime films dating back to Francesco Rosi’s trailblazing Salvatore Giuliano.

May 31, 2017 — Long difficult to see, this transgressive silent masterpiece draws on a wide range of aesthetic influences to push against the boundaries of film form.

Apr 7, 2017 — Filmmaker Brock DeShane pays heartfelt tribute to Jack H. Harris, the late cult-horror maestro who produced low-budget sensations like The Blob and Equinox.

Feb 6, 2017 — In the inaugural installment of his new column, archivist Michael Chaiken examines the Nobel Prize–winning icon’s unique artistic process through a collection of ephemera.

Oct 5, 2016 — Rock critic Robert Christgau examines the evocative use of three early Leonard Cohen songs in Robert Altman’s brilliant revisionist western.

Apr 8, 2014 — In telling the story of the young outcast Antoine Doinel, François Truffaut was moving both backward and forward in time—recalling his own experience while forging a filmic language that would grow more sophisticated throughout the 1960s.

Oct 20, 2008 — Though he had been directing films since the silent era, Kenji Mizoguchi didn’t become an international sensation until after the Second World War, benefiting from a new fascination with Japan’s cinematic output.

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

Dec 6, 2004 — In his first freestanding biblical epic, Cecil B. DeMille recognized and revered a profound quality in the American soul—its ability to leap over every contradiction through an invincible sense of its own righteousness.