Where the Crawdads Sing

Sep 22, 2008 — With their rotating casts of sourpuss Finns and their stringent compositions, Aki Kaurismäki’s films would seem the least likely candidates for laughs, yet his black-comic precision has made him one of the most warmly embraced filmmakers on the international art-house...

Jun 23, 2008 — The year 1950 marked a turning point in Anthony Mann’s career, the moment when he passed from the series of brilliant film-noir B movies that had established him to the westerns that made him a major figure. Mann released three...

May 12, 2008 — Today it may be hard to understand the shock waves that Louis Malle’s romantic drama created with its “frank” depiction of a woman’s sexual pleasure, but in the context of late-1950s France, it was a bombshell.

Aug 20, 2007 — In the mid-sixties, Luis Buñuel became fascinated by the youth rebellion that culminated with the events of May 1968 in Paris and also manifested itself in music, fashion, opposition to institutions, family, and state. Buñuel felt that the forces of...

May 21, 2007 — In January 1948, British film producer Sir Alexander Korda, head of British-Lion and London Film Productions, commissioned novelist Graham Greene to write and research “an original postwar continental story to be based on either or both of the following territories:...

Feb 19, 2007 — For a director whose vision is so frequently called pessimistic, Mikio Naruse’s drama exhibits a lightness of touch, deft and coolly understated, like its cocktail jazz score.

Apr 17, 2006 — In the absence of a finished, definitive edit of Orson Welles’s enigmatic project, three writers dive into the unsolvable mystery of the film and the different versions presented in the Criterion edition.

Dec 5, 2005 — If there is a skeleton key to François Truffaut’s oeuvre, it is this film, in which all of his assorted gifts and preoccupations are in play and meshed into a uniquely idiosyncratic whole.

Aug 23, 2004 — This drama about young dreamers is the first definitive plunge into many of Federico Fellini’s dominant thematic and imagistic preoccupations.

Aug 2, 2004 — The three film’s in Renoir’s trilogy are comic period fantasies in dazzling color, offering a kind of continuous, bustling choreography in which shifting power relations between upper and lower classes and between spectators and performers literally turn the world into...