Behind the Mask

Sep 20, 2022 — The Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan’s strip-club-set drama is an intricate tapestry of grief and trauma, held together by a longing for human connection.

Aug 19, 2009 — I Am Waiting: Port of Call The year: 1957. The city: Yokohama, not far from the piers. The sound of the tide softly lapping against stones in the darkness, cubes of black ice in a tumbler of foam. Night. Rain....

May 10, 2022 — Joseph Losey’s sumptuous portrait of Nazi-occupied Paris sees an icy Alain Delon as an art dealer on a Kafkaesque quest for identity.

Aug 13, 2010 — The Docks of New York When John Grierson, the Scotsman whose absolute devotion to realism on film—he coined the word documentary and created the National Film Board of Canada—was asked how he’d enjoyed a screening of a now-lost Josef von Sternberg...

Nov 21, 2023 — What stuck with me most after watching La cérémonie (1995) for the first time was the chewing gum.It’s not the scene most often cited in discussions of this late-career classic from French thriller master Claude Chabrol. Don’t get me wrong:...

Jul 7, 2015 — Our recollections of Robert Siodmak’s 1946 movie The Killers are apt to center on three primary elements: Ernest Hemingway’s story, so literally brought to the screen in the film’s opening scenes; Ava Gardner, carrying the full weight of that late-forties...

Aug 14, 2016 — While considered to lie outside the highly policed boundaries of film noir, films like Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind and Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes nevertheless share many of noir’s stylistic and thematic tropes.

Jun 30, 2008 — The novelist Mishima Yukio stepped behind the camera to adapt his own short story, which depicts the act of seppuku as a thing of beauty.

Apr 16, 2018 — Following lineup announcements from the Cannes Film Festival and Critics’ Week, the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, or Directors’s Fortnight has presented the slate for its fiftieth edition, running from May 9 through 19. “As per the tradition of the parallel section,”...

Apr 9, 2018 — Ingrid Bergman’s work in her native Sweden was an early showcase for her dazzlingly precocious talent and emotional depth.