Body

Nov 19, 1989 — After finishing High and Low (1963), director Akira Kurosawa recalls, “I started looking around for something else to do and quite by accident picked up [the novel] Red Beard by Shugoro Yamamoto. At first I thought it would make a...

Nov 19, 1989 — Almost as long as they’ve been able to talk, films have been able to sing and dance. Frequently high-style, often rapturously romantic, most musicals have nonetheless been content to remain light, sophisticated entertainment. Still, there has always been a minority...

Aug 24, 1989 — Yasujiro Ozu’s favorite theme of the stresses and strains of parent-child relationships figure prominently in this story of a raggle-taggle theater troupe giving its final performances in a small fishing village.

Apr 3, 1989 — If the notion of “fiftes science-fiction films” conjures up pictures of scantily clad women defending their virtue against rubber-suited aliens, it is not for want of exceptions. MGM’s Forbidden Planet remains the most remarkable of these, a glossy, relatively high-budget...

Dec 5, 1988 — This existential thriller didn’t begin its life as a cannily trendy product of studio filmmaking, but rather as the very personal expression of the imagination of one of European art cinema’s greatest talents, Michelangelo Antonioni.

Nov 14, 1988 — It is sometimes as important to be in touch with the truths of your own time as it is to be in touch with its metaphors. 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the most influential films ever made, constructed a...

Feb 1, 1988 — Charles Laughton’s classic has the feel and the force of an American folk fable; yet, it also mixes rural humor with gothic humor, biblical quotation and Freudian symbolism, and everyday realities with a near-mythic confrontation between the forces of good...

Jan 11, 1988 — In Young and Innocent (1937) Alfred Hitchcock uses all the signs in his visual vocabulary to tell one of his favorite stories: fugitive hero unjustly accused of murder. Yet this is also a story of youth and innocence triumphant—a light...

Nov 10, 1986 — Max Ophuls’s masterpiece is a transformation of a conventional subject into an avant-garde adventure, and a spectacular stylistic breakthrough in the utilization of wide screen and color.