A Place in the World

Oct 28, 2014 — What you hear is as crucial—and as funny—as what you see in Tati’s films.

Jan 20, 2014 — Aki Kaurismäki pays wry tribute to the starving artist in his sad and funny update of Henri Murger’s classic book.

Aug 27, 2013 — Ernst Lubitsch’s World War II–era high-wire act is a profound take on the absurdity cruelty of civilization and a perfect black comedy to boot.

Dec 18, 2012 — One Scene Every time I watch Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, I am stunned that a film could be so full. Here is this thing stuffed with detail, design, behavior, emotion, surprise, and skill. Like Fanny and Alexander and...

Sep 18, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s theatrical spectacle set in early nineteenth-century Paris is an operatic work about passion and artifice.

Jun 27, 2012 — The warrior and philosopher protagonist of The Samurai Trilogy, Musashi Miyamoto, was a real-life seventeenth-century figure. Here, the translator of Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings tells us about this fascinating man and his principles of swordplay and spirituality.

Nov 26, 2010 — Early in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, as the wind from the Texas plains whips the small town of Anarene, the high-school senior Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) halts his recalcitrant pickup truck—Hank Williams is warbling “Why Don’t You Love...

Nov 25, 2010 — Five Easy Pieces is not a statement about America but a closely observed report. Or, perhaps, a confession.

Sep 22, 2009 — 1967 was the year when a great divide opened between “pop” and “rock,” and when the burgeoning S.F. hippie subculture began to usurp the chirpier L.A. world of surf music and Sonny and Cher.

Mar 16, 2009 — This long-underappreciated giant of Japanese cinema was an innovative visual stylist and a born storyteller who preferred to make films about outsiders.