Life in a Year

May 24, 2017 — “Sofia Coppola delivers a very enjoyable southern melodrama, the tale of a handsome, badly wounded Union soldier in enemy terrain during the American civil war who throws himself on the mercy of a ladies’ seminary—of all the outrageous things.” The...

Jul 13, 2015 — “I think that in a few years, in ten, in twenty, or thirty years, we shall know whether Hiroshima mon amour was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema.” That was Eric Rohmer,...

Mar 9, 2015 — François Truffaut’s adultery drama is at times corrosively funny and at others frighteningly tense, but it’s always incisive and humane.

Sep 26, 2013 — Roberto Rossellini officially left neorealism behind with his modern masterpiece, an intimate tale of marriage on the rocks.

Sep 9, 2013 — As outré as it is, the most subversive thing about this classic farce is its take on what’s normal.

Oct 4, 2011 — No film better illustrates Pier Paolo Pasolini’s challenge to conventional representations, to the social and cultural consensus, than his 1976 masterwork.

May 20, 2009 — The title alone screams incongruity. Shohei Imamura’s 1961 black-and-white caper movie Pigs and Battleships bursts with the confusion and exuberance of a cross-cultural encounter. In its lively portrayal of enthusiastic Japanese locals welcoming the U.S. Navy on R&R to the...

Mar 17, 2008 — During the Second World War, when Hiroshi Teshigahara was a schoolboy, Japan’s cities—above all his hometown, Tokyo—were mercilessly firebombed. He, and his future associates in countless artistic undertakings, returned to a landscape of bleak ruins. The adolescent Hiroshi was particularly...

Sep 6, 1999 — The subject of loneliness and the observation of the isolated person has always interested me. Even as a child, I couldn’t help but notice those who didn’t fit in for one reason or another—myself included. In life, and for my...

Jun 10, 1996 — Ever since Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction created a sensation at [this year’s] Cannes Film Festival, where it won top honors (the Palme d’Or), it has been swathed in the wildest hyperbole. In fact, it has sparked an excitement bound to...