The Hero

Nov 25, 2015 — Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film about one man’s mortality offers a study in postwar Japan, Kurosawa vs. Ozu, and the realization that knowing how to die requires learning how to be alive.

Nov 19, 2015 — Satyajit Ray’s long-heralded cinematic achievement was influenced by European cinema but also grew out of long-standing Indian artistic tradition.

Feb 26, 2015 — The threat of death hangs over Watership Down, Martin Rosen’s wise and uncompromising animated adaptation of Richard Adams’s classic novel about rabbits on a survival mission.

Jan 6, 2015 — Kihachi Okamoto's The Sword of Doom is likely to strike the unalerted viewer as an exercise in absurdist violence, tracking the career of a nihilistic swordsman from his gratuitous murder of a defenseless old man to his final descent into...

Dec 11, 2014 — The opening installment of Terry Gilliam’s “Trilogy of Imagination” reminds us we’d be better off if we paid more attention to the kid’s-eye view of things.

Jul 22, 2014 — Jeanne Moreau’s flighty, enigmatic Jackie in Jacques Demy’s poetic drama is in the great tradition of dreamy Demy heroines.

Jul 21, 2014 — Anouk Aimée’s beguiling chanteuse, the title character of Jacques Demy’s romantic debut feature, is the figure from whom the director’s entire cinematic world springs.

Mar 24, 2014 — Rome is as exquisite as it is suffocating in Paolo Sorrentino’s profound tale of contemporary entropy.

Mar 12, 2013 — Working in America, German master Fritz Lang contributed to the anti-Nazi effort with this nightmarish, surreal tale of espionage.

Jun 25, 2012 — For this Edinburgh-based writer and filmmaker, Hitchcock’s Scottish caper is both fantasy and reality.