The Tasters

Dec 15, 2016 — Repertory PicksThis weekend, Jean Renoir’s La chienne will screen at the Trylon microcinema, in Minneapolis, as part of a monthlong series dedicated to the French master’s groundbreaking work in the 1930s. A thematic precursor to The Rules of the Game,...

Nov 29, 2016 — Anahita Ghazvinizadeh’s short film Needle, which won the 2013 Cinefondation prize at Cannes, premieres today on the Criterion Channel as part of our weekly Short + Feature. I first met Anahita through programming the short at the Chicago International Film...

Sep 22, 2016 — As part of a two-month series highlighting Yasujiro Ozu’s late-career work, the Pacific Film Archive is showing Equinox Flower, a family drama about a conservative father and his rebellious daughter, who refuses to accept his plans for her arranged marriage.

Jun 23, 2016 — Repertory PicksThis week, the TIFF Cinematheque in Toronto will show Akira Kurosawa’s 1960 dramatic thriller The Bad Sleep Well as part of its summer series of special screenings. Starring the Japanese screen icon and longtime Kurosawa collaborator Toshiro Mifune, the...

Nov 12, 2015 — Michael Haneke’s politically prescient drama explores the tenuous, uneasy connections between inhabitants of a globally interwoven Europe.

Mar 24, 2014 — Rome is as exquisite as it is suffocating in Paolo Sorrentino’s profound tale of contemporary entropy.

Feb 7, 2011 — Death looms over the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda. His first fiction feature, Maborosi (1995), is a quiet study of bereavement, about a young woman struggling to move on after her husband’s inexplicable suicide. In After Life (1998), a supernatural fable...

Jan 23, 2006 — Ingmar Bergman was enjoying one of the happiest spells of his life while making The Virgin Spring (1960). On a personal level, he was felicitously ensconced in his fourth marriage, to the concert pianist Käbi Laretei. And, professionally, he was...

Nov 21, 2005 — Akira Kurosawa’s late masterpiece is a tragedy fed by Shakespeare, Noh, and the samurai epic; it shows human brutality, warfare, and suffering as if from the eye of a dispassionate God.

Feb 16, 2004 — In this quintessential noir, Samuel Fuller breaks with the Red Scare formula of his contemporaries by contrasting the faceless evil of Communism against the peccadilloes of the workaday American crook.