This and That

Feb 28, 2014 — Other first films exude the sparkling joy of filmmaking that one feels in Breathless, but how many can boast its sure-handedness?

Feb 4, 2014 — When François Truffaut was a twenty-three-year-old film critic, in 1955, he read an autobiographical first novel by a seventy-four-year-old writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. “The book overwhelmed me,” he later recalled, “and I wrote: If I ever succeed in making films, I...

Nov 25, 2013 — He massages, he gambles, and he’s great with a blade. Who is this blind swordsman, anyway?

Sep 23, 2013 — The neorealist master and the Hollywood icon forged a brilliant artistic path together, despite the backlash their controversial romance generated.

Jul 22, 2013 — Gabriel Axel’s exquisite adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s short tale of grace through art provides spiritual and sensual sustenance.

Jul 1, 2013 — How the original comic everyman made us laugh and fear for his life.

Jun 26, 2013 — On the life and work of the famous Czech author, and the pleasures and challenges of translating him.

Feb 12, 2013 — The Dardenne brothers return to the streets of Seraing for a typically humane and suspenseful story of personal redemption.

Jun 12, 2012 — Hal Ashby’s delicately off-kilter May-December romance stars two of the unlikeliest countercultural icons of the seventies.

Oct 4, 2011 — Masaki Kobayashi rejects the notion of individual submission to the group, condemning the hierarchical structures that pervaded Japanese political and social life in the 1950s and 1960s.