Performance.

May 16, 2016 — Almost from the moment she made her breakthrough performance in Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City, Anna Magnani became an icon of Italian cinema. Her ferocious presence and multifaceted talent continued to enliven the work of a wide range of directors,...

May 10, 2016 — Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place imbues the conventions of film noir with a subtle, tense vulnerability that lends a naturalistic weight to the film’s powerful emotional impact.

Apr 27, 2016 — In Phoenix, Christian Petzold sets his nuanced melodrama of postwar German-Jewish identity within a starkly realist aesthetic, making newly fascinating use of his enduring interest in the tensions between the real and the artificial.

Apr 20, 2016 — In an interview published this week at the A. V. Club, writer Adam Nayman sits down with actor Nina Hoss, the star of Christian Petzold’s haunting 2014 film Phoenix, which we’re releasing on disc next week. The film is a...

Apr 14, 2016 — Repertory PicksThis week, the RiverRun International Film Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is hosting a screening of D. A. Pennebaker’s 1968 film Monterey Pop. Playing as part of From the Archives: Rock on Film, a music-themed sidebar to the festival,...

Apr 12, 2016 — Howard Hawks’s 1939 aviation classic Only Angels Have Wings is an exemplar of the auteurist Hollywood entertainer’s capability to fuse “a personal existential statement and a delightful piece of showmanship.”

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.

Apr 4, 2016 — Ray Dolby did not match the conventional image of an eccentric inventor, nor that of a business mogul. But his name now represents a benchmark by which the recording of sound and its playback on disc and in movie theaters...

Mar 31, 2016 — Since its initial release more than half a century ago, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves has been lauded as one of cinema’s greatest achievements. Loosely adapted from a novel by Luigi Bartolini, the film centers on a father’s quest—with his...

Mar 23, 2016 — We had come to expect Chantal Akerman’s periodic gifts of small and large cinematic gems. Certain of this flow, we were devastated when, all too abruptly, we were forced to think of her latest film, so beautiful, as her last.