High Life

Nov 23, 2008 — The possession of a real voice is always a marvel, an almost religious thing.

Nov 19, 2008 — Albert Lamorisse’s principled balancing of objective fact with childish wish fulfillment results in a new, paradoxical genre—the documentary of dreams.

Sep 29, 2008 — After Ozu died on his sixtieth birthday, December 12, 1963, some thirty-two diaries were discovered. They were from 1933 to 1963, and though a few years were missing, they offer a commentary on the life of the director and reveal...

Aug 18, 2008 — This modest-scale psychological drama by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger follows an explosives expert with a drinking problem who harbors a great deal of bitterness.

Jun 30, 2008 — The novelist Mishima Yukio stepped behind the camera to adapt his own short story, which depicts the act of seppuku as a thing of beauty.

Jun 16, 2008 — Claude Sautet occupies a unique place in French cinema. Although he directed some of the biggest hits of the seventies and worked with some of the biggest stars, few critics considered him an “auteur” in his lifetime. Paradoxically, it was...

May 19, 2008 — Top fashion models bleeding from sharp-edged aluminum dresses. A comic-strip American superhero oozing stigmata. A naked couple electrically zapped for the delectation of the TV-viewing public. These are some of the images from the fiction films of American expatriate in...

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.

May 12, 2008 — This intensely personal work about a self-destructive young man would help alleviate Louis Malle’s doubts about his career.

Apr 21, 2008 — Juan Antonio Bardem combines neorealism with noir thriller to create a new dialect that would forge a new Spanish cinematic language.