Black and Blue

Jan 28, 2014 — Terence Davies beckons the viewer into a private world of moods and sensations with this exquisite childhood reverie.

Nov 20, 2012 — For a brief, shining moment, the genteel Japanese studio mutated into a fun house of grim ghouls and slimy aliens.

Nov 14, 2012 — Jean Luc Godard’s exuberant, multipronged attack on the bourgeoisie is both theater of the absurd and political horror.

Aug 29, 2012 — With humor and melancholy, Franc Roddam’s coming-of-age drama, based on the Who’s iconic album, shows us a g-g-generation on the edge.

Oct 4, 2011 — Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work demonstrates an aversion for the present while simultaneously suggesting the impossibility of escaping it, and thus the need to confront it.

Jun 10, 2011 — Bringing Junichiro Tanizaki’s sprawling, elegiac histor­ical novel The Makioka Sisters (1948) to the screen would seem an undertaking tailor-made for Kon Ichikawa. The renowned writer’s work was familiar territory for the veteran director, who had adapted the quirky Tanizaki novella...

Nov 23, 2010 — Easy Rider is a record of a certain time in American history, and a chronicle of a culture clash that never quite ended.

Sep 22, 2009 — One enters any major film festival with hopes of discovering a budding auteur, a new voice from some previously unheard-from part of the world—a Julián Hernández or Corneliu Porumboiu or Bong Joon-ho. At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, however,...

Mar 10, 2009 — Akira Kurosawa made Dodes’ka-den (1970) during the most crisis-laden period of his career. He had just spent two years embroiled in an ill-fated venture with the Hollywood studio Twentieth Century Fox to direct the Japanese segments of the World War...

Jun 30, 2008 — The idea of self-fashioning—of deliberately taking the raw materials of one’s body and mind and transforming them into a work of art—has been with us at least since the Renaissance. Yet no one, not even Oscar Wilde, has so rigorously...