The World of Us

Sep 26, 2014 — For this week’s festival of free films on Hulu, we put French bombshell Brigitte Bardot in the spotlight. The gorgeous actor, singer, and model burst onto the scene with Roger Vadim’s scandalous 1956 romp And God Created Woman, and was...

Jan 13, 2014 — With economy and panache, Michael Mann established his existential crime drama style with this breakthrough first feature.

Oct 21, 2013 — As a film star, John Cassavetes embodied the kinetic, wild-eyed, insanely grinning villain. He seemed born to the role, with his volatile energy and dynamic outbursts, luminous yet curiously deadened eyes, wide-gaping mouth (David Thomson has likened it to a...

Jan 28, 2013 — The release of Pina, Wim Wenders’s magical documentary tribute to the choreographer Pina Bausch, has put us in mind of the pioneering work of Martha Graham, the mother of modern dance. For a splendid sample of Graham’s legendary work, check...

Aug 2, 2012 — This week we lost one of the great artists of the past century, Chris Marker. Though best known for his 1962 La Jetée, a science-fiction epic in miniature told through black-and-white still photographs, and his 1983 Sans Soleil, a personal...

Feb 28, 2012 — In the long history of stage-to-screen translations, there’s never been anything quite like Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), an astonishing hybrid blurring the boundaries between theater and film, rehearsal and performance, actor and character. The production began in...

Feb 7, 2012 — La Jetée (1963) and Sans Soleil (1983), made a tidy twenty years apart, are the twin peaks of Chris Marker’s creative achievements and his best-loved and most widely seen films. But who is Chris Marker? Writer, photographer, editor, filmmaker, videographer,...

Apr 18, 2011 — An Eagle for an Emperor, a Gyrfalcon for a King;   a Peregrine for a Prince, a Saker for a Knight, a Merlin for a Lady;   a Goshawk for a Yeoman, a Sparrowhawk for a Priest,   a Musket...

Nov 8, 2010 — To say that Lars von Trier deals in provocation and controversy is like saying John Ford made westerns: obviously true, but far from giving a measure of the director’s importance. Ever since The Element of Crime polarized critics at Cannes...

Jun 23, 2010 — “Wittily written and spare as a coded message . . . The year’s most perilous ride . . . , we wouldn’t exchange it for a season’s commutation ticket on most of the similar vehicles running out of Hollywood.” So...