The World of Us

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.

Jan 11, 1989 — Thursday, March 2, 1944—the United States is in its third year of war with the Axis powers. More than 12 million Americans are fighting on various fronts; the German armies are being repulsed at Anzio and the newspapers have large...

Jul 9, 2026 — Deep Dives One of the most mischievous figures in world cinema, Věra Chytilová is still best known for Daisies, the daring 1966 film whose gonzo vision of female rebellion and empowerment launched her into the public eye. This Czechoslovak New...

Jul 2, 2026 — I first met Courtney Love in 1994. I was twelve years old, and I felt ugly and confused pretty much all the time. I was slouching through the locker bay at Calle Mayor Middle School in Torrance, California, when I...

Oct 4, 2023 — Night has fallen in London, but the streets still teem with people. Through a second-story window, we watch as an elderly Jewish man who lives over a shop is stabbed to death and his rooms are set on fire. We...

Apr 22, 2022 — Over my forty-plus years at Janus and Criterion, few films have meant more to me than For All Mankind, because of my lifelong passion for space travel. I remember being a second-semester freshman and registering for Astronomy 101. It was...

Mar 29, 2022 — About half an hour into love jones, Theodore Witcher’s romance from 1997 starring Larenz Tate and Nia Long, the two main characters amble along a Chicago block as raindrops fall, soft but insistent. The colors are warm, naturalistic—browns, mauves, and...

Feb 23, 2021 — Released in 1985, during the exuberant flowering of films by women brought on by second-wave feminism, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk now feels less of those years than like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, an early challenge to a cultural...

Oct 15, 2020 — Songbook According to Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flür, it was toward the end of the group’s first U.S. tour when his bandmates Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider grew fascinated by the phenomenon of American radio. Their time in the States had...

Sep 16, 2020 — When I think of Albert Brooks, the first image that invariably comes to mind is that of a worry-stricken man desperately impressing his anxieties upon a bemused, notably less nebbishy partner, presenting an elaborate case for the legitimacy of those...