The Classic

Mar 23, 2010 — In the Akira Kurosawa movie family tree, Sanjuro is the sassy kid brotherto Yojimbo, and like many lighthearted younger siblings, it’s underrated. After Yojimbo achieved blockbuster status in 1961, Kurosawa took a story he’d already developed, about a semistrong but...

May 3, 2009 — Though primarily a celebration of the best of today’s world cinema, the Cannes Film Festival has for some time now also been making room for the past, with its sidebar Cannes Classics. A program of restored and rediscovered films, Cannes...

Nov 2, 2008 — To see the gorgeous Fanfan la Tulipe is to go back in time twice over: to the film’s eighteenth-century French setting and to the international cinema world of more than fifty years ago, when this genial action farce was initially...

A lifelong cinephile, this French filmmaker reinvigorated cinema throughout the sixties and seventies by breaking from the industry’s bloated “tradition of quality.”

With this vital movement, Italian filmmakers delivered an urgent response to political and economic turmoil in the wake of World War II.

Nov 15, 2004 — Short Cuts is an L.A. jazz rhapsody that represents Robert Altman at an all-time personal peak—and it came at just the right time in his career.

Apr 15, 2002 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s first-class crime picture may be the most elegantly rigorous movie ever made about a cockeyed heist.

Jan 11, 1999 — This epic reimagining of medieval Russia was the most historically audacious production made in the twenty-odd years after Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.

Jul 8, 1992 — Since its first screening in 1960, Jean-Luc Godard’s astonishing debut has lost none of its power to thrill an audience or change the way we see the world.

Feb 8, 1988 — Sidney Lumet’s courtroom drama explores the process of law in human hands, where prejudice, fear, weakness, and even weather can divert the carriage of justice.