Out West

Jul 21, 1998 — Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy, of which this release is the first part, was adapted from Eiji Yoshikawa’s epic novel Musashi Miyamoto, which has been called Japan’s Gone with the Wind. The comparison is valid, for the tale of the medieval...

May 5, 1998 — Borrowing inspiration from doom-laden French crime movies like Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le samouraï and ancient Chinese chronicles of patriotic assassins, John Woo’s film is a passionate cinematic upheaval.

Sep 26, 1993 — Kon Ichikawa’s magisterial achievement is a barbed, poignant, and seductive elegy that draws on the skills he acquired over his four-decade career.

Aug 12, 1991 — It is 1945. For the first time in four years, the Southern Pacific stops in Black Rock.  A one-armed man named John J. MacReedy (Spencer Tracy) steps off the train. This brooding stranger makes the few residents who inhabit the...

Mar 5, 1990 — Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist masterwork is one of the greatest portraits of old age and loneliness ever brought to the screen.

Feb 11, 1990 — Bob Rafelson’s ultimate road movie is a relaxed masterpiece, a film of laid-back innovation that hasn’t aged one iota since its original release.

Sep 4, 1989 — Unintentionally, Jean Renoir’s India-set drama had become an early example of the dissolution of plot critics would hail ten years later in L’avventura.

Jun 25, 1989 — A thoroughgoing investigation of the terms “bravery” and “cowardice,” Stanley Kubrick’s early work offers far more than a mere “anti-war” statement, paring with almost surgical precision to the heart of the fear, hubris and mendacity that keep the war machine...

Feb 1, 1988 — Based on the novel by W.T. Burnett, this heist film set in a nameless midwestern city offered moviegoers in 1950 a new view of crime.

Oct 5, 2016 — Rock critic Robert Christgau examines the evocative use of three early Leonard Cohen songs in Robert Altman’s brilliant revisionist western.