Absolute Power

Mar 16, 2015 — Director and star Robert Montgomery suffuses his moody 1947 New Mexico–set noir with palpable postwar anxiety and expressive fatalism.

Jul 30, 2013 — Guillermo del Toro’s ghostly fable beautifully reflects the director’s fascination with the personal and the political.

Jul 22, 2013 — Gabriel Axel’s exquisite adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s short tale of grace through art provides spiritual and sensual sustenance.

May 13, 2013 — Delmer Daves’s visually majestic, emotionally charged western finds its drama in the decency of its characters.

Sep 18, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s theatrical spectacle set in early nineteenth-century Paris is an operatic work about passion and artifice.

Aug 14, 2012 — The Dardennes threw down the gauntlet for a new type of unadorned dramatic storytelling with their breakthrough tale of a working-class boy’s fraught coming-of-age.

Apr 24, 2012 — With a projector, a screen, some red cellophane, a pipe cleaner, and this script, you can re-create this performance piece by Hollis Frampton.

Mar 27, 2012 — The mysterious letter was signed “Joe.” David Lean’s lawyer had sent me a batch of old correspondence. Struggling with a biography of Lean, I was desperate for any leads, and this one seemed worth following up. But how does one...

Nov 15, 2011 — The thematic ideas and inspirations that sparked Three Colors: Blue (1993), though typically ambitious in scope, seem sketchy when compared to the intense experience of watching this exquisite film. We know that Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy corresponds to the...

Jun 21, 2010 — A new man is being born, fraught with all the fears and terrors and stammerings that are associated with a period of gestation. —Michelangelo Antonioni Red Desert came out in 1964, almost twenty years after the end of the war,...