Across the Universe

Aug 24, 2011 — NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers. Not long into Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine (2007), a melodrama about suffering, salvation, and the dangerously blurred line between belief and madness, the heroine encounters the first of several challenges to her way of...

Jul 17, 2015 — As visually and sociopolitically expansive as it is intimate in its details of a boy’s coming of age, Jan Troell’s film is one of the great cinematic debuts.

May 23, 2012 — Iranian master director Abbas Kiarostami voyaged to Italy to make a film that questions love, relationships, and Western art cinema.

Nov 17, 2020 — Along with Dead Man (1995), his previous narrative feature, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai marks a quantum leap in the Jim Jarmusch universe—a discovery of history (both antiquity and tradition) that carries with it a sense of gravity and even tragedy...

Dec 15, 2020 — One day in the late 1990s, when I was a young staff member at an art and media magazine, my boss asked me to interview an esteemed creative director of an ad agency. A few months earlier, that same magazine...

Apr 24, 2015 — Atypical in style and subject, Yasujiro Ozu’s early crime dramas show a future master brilliantly experimenting with camera and editing.

Jan 30, 2025 — The next four days see the spotlights hit Frederick Wiseman, Jerry Schatzberg, Chantal Akerman, and more.

Mar 18, 2024 — It’s an eclectic bunch this month, featuring a new play, a ban on the color green, and Godzilla.

Sep 11, 2018 — A majestic meditation on humankind’s place in the cosmos, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life derives much of its power from the sheer range of its kaleidoscopic imagery. The film interweaves the story of one boy’s coming of age in 1950s Waco, Texas, with a...

Jul 7, 2021 — In the 1990s, Hong Kong was home to a staggering number of the most gifted and charismatic actors in the world. It’s impossible to imagine the films of Wong Kar Wai—or the global art-house phenomenon they generated—without these extraordinary performers;...