The Word

Dec 15, 2021 — The Film Independent Spirit Awards usher in a fresh round of contenders, while critics across the country vote for their favorites.

May 28, 2019 — It has taken me forty years to appreciate the audacity of Agnès Varda in writing and directing One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977). Not only did Varda make her subject the most crucial and vexed issue of the feminist movement, at that...

Apr 19, 2018 — With a mix of improvisation, balletic physicality, and slapstick humor, Hollywood master Leo McCarey crafted the most sublime of screwball comedies.

Feb 22, 2018 — Bengali cinema icon Uttam Kumar stars as a matinee idol on the brink of failure in this deeply introspective meditation on art and fame.

Mar 30, 2015 — The astonishing intimacy and scope of this remarkable, aesthetically captivating epic ushered in a new era of narrative documentary filmmaking.

Mar 18, 2014 — In addition to technical brilliance and a humanist message, Akira Kurosawa’s adventure features one of the director’s strongest female characters.

Oct 23, 2013 — If there’s one quality that separates John Cassavetes’s movies from almost everybody else’s, it’s the density of detail in the storytelling. His films need to be read closely, from beginning to end. There are no lulls with Cassavetes, no lapses...

Aug 23, 2011 — Intimidation: The Weird Dream MakerImpassioned and dedicated craftsman of some of Japanese cinema’s biggest box-office successes and most eccentric off-genre sorties, longtime Nikkatsu studios mainstay Koreyoshi Kurahara (1927–2002) was a filmmaker with two opposite yet inseparable signature points of view....

Dec 16, 2010 — Guardian film editor Andrew Pulver, the author of the BFI Film Classics monograph on Jules Dassin’s Night and the City, has distilled his appreciation of the film into a column for the paper. “It’s the title that gets you first—so elemental and sinewy,”...

Jun 24, 2024 — Costars and critics remember an outstanding actor who neither looked nor sounded like a movie star.