the vision machine

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...

Apr 17, 2026 — So many Hamlets! Plus Radley Metzger, Marco Bellocchio, and Tilda Swinton and Orbital.

Jan 25, 2012 — Creating an effect of pity and terror unique in Francesco Rosi’s cinema, The Moment of Truth ought by rights to be counted among his finest achievements. On its original release in 1965, Pauline Kael acclaimed “the beauty of rage, masterfully...

Feb 11, 2022 — The director discusses the making of his 1979 cult road movie, Radio On, which is now streaming exclusively on the Criterion Channel, and the influence of New German Cinema on his visual style.

Dec 1, 2020 — The brochure for the 1961 Lincoln Continental line makes the six-seater luxury sedans look almost dainty. They come in pretty pastels: a cream called Sultana White, a fizzy yellow known as Sunburst, an ice-cream-parlor blue-green dubbed Turquoise Mist. A gloved...

Jul 18, 2011 — Out of the extravagant variety of Jean Cocteau’s work—the paintings and drawings, the poems, the plays and novels and memoirs, the opera librettos and ballet scenarios—it is likely his films that will have the most enduring influence, and among those,...

May 16, 2011 — Among the most enduringly popular motives for murder, in films as in life, is the desire to remove an impediment to happiness—to get somebody, once and for all, out of the way. In life, of course, the goal of freeing...

Apr 26, 2022 — In the opening moments of Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) (2020), we first hear—the ceaseless hum of machines at work—and then see: a jumble of multicolored wires. The 16 mm film image is grainy, trembling ever...

Jun 20, 2017 — At the dawn of sound cinema, French theater titan Marcel Pagnol immortalized his epic vision of his native Provence in three exquisite humanist dramas.

Mar 13, 2024 — The subject of a revelatory retrospective at last year’s Morelia International Film Festival, this groundbreaking director ushered in Mexican cinema’s golden age with vibrant explorations of the nation’s folk traditions and revolutionary past.