The Stage

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.

Mar 4, 2014 — The great documentarian Claude Lanzmann’s new movie, made from footage he didn’t use in Shoah, provides a fascinating glipse at the way he began that monumental project.

Mar 22, 2011 — In 1985, deep into the twelve-year reign of the Reagan-Bush administration, Rob Epstein mounted a Hollywood stage with Richard Schmiechen, both men resplendent in tuxedos. Epstein was only twenty-nine years old. The director had just made history, with producer Schmiechen,...

Jan 11, 2011 — Given the scarcity of information available in the sixties, director Byron Haskin did a remarkable job of representing some of the conditions on our nearest planetary neighbor, nearly a year before the first close-up views of the real Martian surface.

Jun 21, 2022 — Two eras of Hong Kong history collide in this exquisite ghost story, which solidified director Stanley Kwan’s status as one of cinema’s truest romantics.

Dec 18, 2012 — One Scene Every time I watch Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, I am stunned that a film could be so full. Here is this thing stuffed with detail, design, behavior, emotion, surprise, and skill. Like Fanny and Alexander and...

Jan 17, 2012 — “I felt they showed more of me than they’d said they were going to,” Catherine Deneuve remarked to Pascal Bonitzer in 2004, about the making of Luis Buñuel’s 1967 Belle de jour. “There were moments when I felt totally used....

Jun 22, 2010 — In the autumn of 1989, the Iranian magazine Sorush printed a story about an unusual crime: a poor man had been arrested for impersonating a celebrated film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, to a middle-class family in northern Tehran. Although the accused,...

Jul 2, 2018 — The sweetness and aggression of female erotic pleasure take center stage in Pussy, an imaginatively stylized animated short now playing on FilmStruck.

Sep 26, 2017 — The sexual pedagogy of a masochistic music instructor takes center stage in this shocking study of art, control, and repression.