Free Cinema

Apr 8, 2016 — Ten years ago, with the release of his debut film Reprise, a spirited drama about two young aspiring novelists, Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier emerged as one of the most interesting new voices in European cinema.

Jan 26, 2015 — Scenes without endings, sounds without corresponding images, actions without seeming motivation—Lucrecia Martel’s sense-heightening debut offers a cinema of subtraction.

Jun 19, 2013 — Disorienting, brutal, and bloody beautiful, František Vláčil’s epic is a dark medieval vision teeming with cinematic invention.

May 22, 2012 — These five films chart the unlikely ascendance of a hero of American underground cinema.

Nov 14, 2011 — In 1989, the Communist rule that had dominated Eastern Europe since the end of the Second World War collapsed with astonishing rapidity. If the long-term political, economic, and ideological consequences of Europe’s reunification are still unfolding, there was an immediate...

Aug 24, 2011 — NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers. Not long into Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine (2007), a melodrama about suffering, salvation, and the dangerously blurred line between belief and madness, the heroine encounters the first of several challenges to her way of...

Mar 15, 2011 — In Edward Yang’s cinema in general, and in Yi Yi in particular, character and environment are inseparable.

Dec 7, 2010 — In 1981, it seemed to me that a new era of fantastic cinema was upon us.

Oct 12, 2009 — Man is Not a Bird: Flying Away The term “independent cinema” has lost its punch in recent years, from overuse and misapplication. One need only look to the films of Dušan Makavejev for a reminder of its true meaning. This...

Nov 2, 2008 — To see the gorgeous Fanfan la Tulipe is to go back in time twice over: to the film’s eighteenth-century French setting and to the international cinema world of more than fifty years ago, when this genial action farce was initially...