The New World

Feb 11, 2008 — Though today he is most fondly remembered for his later romantic comedies, typifying Hollywood filmmaking in its heyday, it should be known that Ernst Lubitsch was also a pioneer of the modern movie musical.

Jan 14, 2008 — As Japan was coming out of World War II, Akira Kurosawa was coming into his own as a filmmaker.

Jun 18, 2007 — Yasujiro Ozu had already directed forty-five features by the time he started work on Early Spring, in 1955, but the artistic and commercial success of his previous film, Tokyo Story (1953), had rejuvenated him.

May 21, 2007 — Carol Reed’s masterpiece dives deep into the life and mind of screenwriter Graham Greene, one of Britain’s greatest postwar novelist.

Jan 22, 2007 — Forget the Beatles vs. Elvis: for me the world is divided into Karloff people and Lugosi people, and I’m in the Karloff clique. Bela Lugosi’s oversize mannerisms and thickly accented drawl have always seemed camp to me, while Boris Karloff’s...

Dec 4, 2006 — A companion piece to Grey Gardens, this documentary stands on its own as a portrait of two women creatively passing the time as Rome burns.

Apr 17, 2006 — Another movie, another cause célèbre: this mysterious film by Orson Welles has been dismissed as a disaster and hailed as a masterpiece.

Oct 24, 2005 — Mirroring changes in awareness, politics, and lifestyle occurring across the globe, the chanbara (or Japanese swordplay film) underwent a significant metamorphosis in the early 1960s, acquiring a decidedly more radical spirit. Seemingly without warning, groundbreaking cinematic styles from beyond the...

Aug 2, 2004 — The three film’s in Renoir’s trilogy are comic period fantasies in dazzling color, offering a kind of continuous, bustling choreography in which shifting power relations between upper and lower classes and between spectators and performers literally turn the world into...

May 9, 2004 — With his vibrant chronicle of an Oedipal revolt, Volker Schlöndorff captures the source novel’s singular recreation of the German past.