Mother

Jan 8, 1996 — Dodes’ka-den was made at a low point in Akira Kurosawa’s long career-perhaps the lowest that the director has ever known. In the preface of the filmmaker’s autobiography, critic and translator Audie Bock reports that Kurosawa’s commercial prospects became bleak in...

Oct 25, 1994 — Kenji Mizoguchi develops his medieval fable about moral freedom and slavery with intuition, cunning, and an overarching sense of tragedy.

Dec 28, 1993 — In his touchstone of postwar Japanese cinema, Kenji Mizoguchi uses woman’s fate to reveal the human cost of oppression.

Dec 19, 1993 — The first above-ground picture made by John Waters was a cinematic breakthrough more profound than Dolby sound or Cinerama.

Sep 30, 1992 — The unprecedented popularity of this gender-bending sex farce inspired two sequels, a hit Broadway musical, and at least one transvestite nightclub.

Sep 24, 1992 — It was in 1947 that Vladimir Nabokov began writing what he described as “a short novel about a man who liked little girls.” Completed in 1954, the manuscript was rejected as pornographic by at least four New York publishers. Nabokov...

May 25, 1992 — If Max Ophuls hadn’t cooled his heels in Hollywood to flee the Nazis, his name might have conjured only the most unintelligible of foreign cinema—vague and inaccessible to the average American filmgoer. But in 1948 Ophuls was given an opportunity...

Mar 9, 1992 — The ads for Boyz N the Hood, the debut of a 23-year old writer-director named John Singleton, treated the film as if it took place in another galaxy—a mysterious fiefdom far, far away. And so it does, set in a...

Jun 3, 1991 — Robert Montgomery stars in the Oscar-nominated role of Joe Pendleton, a lug of a boxer accidentally spirited off to heaven before his time, while Claude Rains is the title character whose job it is to find a way for Pendleton...

Mar 31, 1991 — In Jacques Tati’s final work, the physical borders of spectacle and audience are broken down through a variety of means.