Playing for Keeps

Sep 8, 2015 — Brian De Palma magnifies the pleasures and perils of Hitchcock and toys with the viewer’s spectatorship in his sly and scary horror masterpiece.

Jan 26, 2015 — Scenes without endings, sounds without corresponding images, actions without seeming motivation—Lucrecia Martel’s sense-heightening debut offers a cinema of subtraction.

Jan 20, 2015 — Here he is: the real, unreal Guy Maddin, in his phantasmagorical, polymathic stew of sex, memory, and dreams.

Jun 20, 2014 — Peter Weir’s sun-dappled, sexually charged nightmare about a disappearance in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australia still unnerves due to its radical lack of resolution.

Feb 25, 2014 — A testament to Steven Soderbergh’s versatility, this story of a boy growing up during the Great Depression is a tender but tough-minded look at a child’s inner world.

Jan 6, 2014 — Critics commonly describe Throne of Blood (1957) as Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth. While this description is certainly not untrue, the film is much more than a direct cinematic translation of a literary text. Kurosawa’s movie is a brilliant synthesis...

Oct 22, 2013 — This delicately creepy Hollywood horror movie lives up to its reputation as a classic of the genre.

Aug 20, 2013 — Satyajit Ray’s delicate masterpiece about forbidden love in the late nineteenth century is lovingly adapted from a novella by the great Rabindranath Tagore.

Jan 22, 2013 — Andrei Tarkovsky’s austere, minimalist, and poetic film was the first major accomplishment in an oeuvre that would become one of Russia’s main contributions to the treasury of world cinema.

Dec 5, 2012 — The following is excerpted from an interview that originally appeared in the February 1, 1981, issue of L’avant-scène: Cinéma. It was conducted by Olivier Eyquem and Jean-Claude Missiaen. Eyquem is a documentalist and former staff member at Positif; he blogs...