Out of Life

Feb 11, 1990 — Bob Rafelson’s ultimate road movie is a relaxed masterpiece, a film of laid-back innovation that hasn’t aged one iota since its original release.

Dec 18, 1989 — Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s musical was the first to present a panoramic history of America from the Mississippi levees of the 1880s to the Broadway of the 1920s.

Dec 11, 1989 — Previous rock-and-roll movies had been little more than showcases for the latest music, aimed at exploiting the youth market, cheaply made and melodramatic—then along came one of the most finely crafted films ever made about rock-and-roll.

Sep 4, 1989 — Unintentionally, Jean Renoir’s India-set drama had become an early example of the dissolution of plot critics would hail ten years later in L’avventura.

Aug 24, 1989 — Yasujiro Ozu’s favorite theme of the stresses and strains of parent-child relationships figure prominently in this story of a raggle-taggle theater troupe giving its final performances in a small fishing village.

Sep 5, 1988 — A wild mixture of gangster thriller, slapstick comedy, and bittersweet romance, François Truffaut’s second film was one of the signal works of the French New Wave.

Jul 11, 1988 — Cinema has given us any number of tales of the criminal underworld, and explorations of the mindsets of murderers—yet there’s been nothing quite like Shohei Imamura’s searing work.

Oct 12, 1987 — Akira Kurosawa’s thrilling Cinemascope epic is set squarely within the traditions of the Japanese film genre known as the “Chambara.”

Dec 11, 1986 — If events had turned out differently, Orson Welles’s second film might well be widely regarded as “the greatest film of all time.”

Nov 10, 1986 — Max Ophuls’s masterpiece is a transformation of a conventional subject into an avant-garde adventure, and a spectacular stylistic breakthrough in the utilization of wide screen and color.