Why

Jun 25, 2014 — Hearts and Minds is the classic antiwar documentary film of the Vietnam era. It was released in 1974, one year after the United States withdrew its military forces from Vietnam and a year before North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front...

Jun 24, 2014 — One of the most important contributions Peter Davis’s Hearts and Minds makes to our national dialogue on the Vietnam War is its portrayal of ordinary Vietnamese. For years, the Vietnamese had been conspicuous by their absence in American film and...

Jun 24, 2014 — In 1964, Richard Lester harnessed the Beatles’ exploding superstardom for a giddy day-in-the-life pop masterpiece.

Jun 16, 2014 — Georges Franju evokes the surreal silent serials of Louis Feuillade while constructing his own personal cinematic paradise.

Jun 9, 2014 — Your vigilance as an artist is an amorous vigilance, a vigilance of desire.—Roland Barthes to Michelangelo Antonioni, 1979 It’s lamentable that Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the most fashionable vanguard European filmmakers during the sixties, has mainly been out of fashion...

Jun 5, 2014 — Repertory Picks San Francisco moviegoers beware—the king of the monsters is stomping into town this weekend. Ishiro Honda’s 1954 classic Godzilla (a.k.a. Gojira) plays at the city’s legendary Castro Theatre on Sunday, June 8. Many remakes and imitators have come...

Jun 5, 2014 — The following is excerpted from an interview with Red River editor Christian Nyby that critic Ric Gentry conducted in 1991.

May 19, 2014 — As in his other films, the world of Abbas Kiarostami’s latest is one of simulation, not-quite-realness, and unexpected tenderness.

May 14, 2014 — The author recalls his meetings and correspondence with the uncompromisingly independent British director.

May 13, 2014 — Few national cinemas have confronted the issue of preparedness for war with the creative vigor of England’s. Thorold Dickinson’s The Next of Kin (1942), Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? (1942, from a story by Graham Greene), and, of course,...