Man on Wire

May 5, 2014 — Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against...

Oct 4, 2013 — This fascinating first contact between Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman kicked off one of cinema’s greatest—and most controversial—love affairs.

Sep 16, 2013 — Ingmar Bergman plumbs the depths of a fractured family and gives Ingrid Bergman a shocking star role.

Mar 18, 2013 — Using a 1958 murder spree as a narrative springboard, Terrence Malick fashioned a fractured fairy tale about American innocence lost.

Sep 18, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s theatrical spectacle set in early nineteenth-century Paris is an operatic work about passion and artifice.

Jun 19, 2012 — Steven Soderbergh delivers a poignant psychological portrait of the late Spalding Gray in this deftly structured documentary.

Dec 13, 2011 — Just what is it that makes Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter (1966) so different, so appealing? The cherubic hero in the neat powder blue suit, who looks like he was torn out of a yakuza pop-up book? That hauntingly cornball theme...

Oct 18, 2011 — Hair, There, and Everywhere Are the Leningrad Cowboys for real? With pointy pompadours reaching to impossible heights above their expressionless faces and needlelike winklepicker shoes that could have been torn from the feet of oversize elves, they might be a...

Jul 21, 2011 — Performances When people talk about Mike Leigh’s Naked, the conversation is inevitably focused on David Thewlis’s nerve-shredding, tour de force central performance as the callous drifter Johnny, who slices through life like a straight razor. Yet consider how impossible his...

Apr 25, 2011 — Brian De Palma brought hip, freewheeling funkiness to the American film renaissance of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Wised-up, cinema-savvy audiences across the country knew to seek out his movies for their scruffy wit, showmanship, and aesthetic innovation, not...