At War

Apr 20, 2015 — "Afilm about India without elephants and tiger hunts”—this was how Jean Renoir described his objective in making The River. Guided by Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel, he rejected the India of exotic action and spectacle to make a meditative, almost mystical...

Dec 24, 2014 — Keisuke Kinoshita’s poignant Morning for the Osone Family looks at grief over World War II from the perspective of one Japanese family. Shot immediately following the country’s surrender, when directors like Kinoshita were no longer under the thumb of wartime...

Oct 4, 2011 — Masaki Kobayashi rejects the notion of individual submission to the group, condemning the hierarchical structures that pervaded Japanese political and social life in the 1950s and 1960s.

Aug 16, 2011 — “It is my best film. I always loved it. I always believed in it. It is real cinema, done for cinema—like art for art.” That was Roman Polanski’s view of Cul-de-sac in 1970, four years after its release and just...

Feb 13, 2006 — John Ford’s biographical drama portrays an imaginary antebellum America with relaxed humor and effortless nostalgic charm while sustaining an underlying note of somber apprehension.

Oct 24, 2005 — Hideo Gosha’s swordplay drama captures rebellion against the Japanese feudal system, pitting its twin protagonists against each other but also, together, against the very notion of authority itself.

Jan 10, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki's penultimate film for Nikkatsu is a subversively funny account of the making of a model fascist.

Sep 22, 2020 — Francesco Rosi’s film Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979) is based on Carlo Levi’s novelistic memoir of the same name, which became an instant classic of Italian literature when it appeared at the end of World War II, in 1945. In...

Feb 18, 2014 — The immediacy of an ongoing war electrifies Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful second Hollywood feature.

Aug 7, 2018 — Can creative genius flourish on the federal dime? Animator Norman McLaren’s remarkably innovative, government-funded films suggest it can.