Figures in a Landscape

Jun 21, 2017 — Billing itself as “the world's longest continually-running film festival,” the Edinburgh International Film Festival opens its 71st edition today with Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country, one of five films Alistair Harkness recommends from the lineup in the Scotsman: “Already described...

Mar 8, 2016 — Paris Belongs to Us marked the genesis of Jacques Rivette’s unique filmmaking style—introducing visual and narrative elements that Rivette would build on over the course of his long career.

Dec 10, 2014 — Social satire, women’s melodrama, queer metaphor, or horror movie? Todd Haynes’s elusive masterpiece is all of these and none of them.

Jun 16, 2014 — Georges Franju evokes the surreal silent serials of Louis Feuillade while constructing his own personal cinematic paradise.

Jun 9, 2014 — In the history of cinema, there have been several notable collaborations between a director and an actress over a series of films. Think of D. W. Griffith and Lillian Gish back in the silent era, Josef von Sternberg and Marlene...

Apr 14, 2014 — Lars von Trier brought his brand of provocation to his widest audience yet with this inquiry into faith and human goodness.

Feb 17, 2014 — Flailing fathers, anxious mothers, and their moody offspring—these characters may have tails, but they’re Wes Anderson people through and through.

Mar 21, 2012 — The famed collaboration between director Mikhail Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, which, with its distinctive combination of effective melodrama and a wild, powerful visual style, helped make Kalatozov the most successful Soviet cinematic export of his generation, in fact spanned...

Feb 9, 2010 — You can’t keep a good woman, or a great movie about a good woman, down. By all accounts, goodness in the real Lola Montez reflected the vagaries of character, not talent. She was, as Cosmo Brown says of Lina Lamont...

Jan 26, 2010 — Roberto Rossellini’s second postwar film was released in the United States as Paisan, and one can understand why the distributors wanted to use a title familiar to many Americans as meaning “friend” or “countryman” for a work that is at...