The Best Years

Aug 24, 2010 — Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928) was first and foremost a star vehicle for Emil Jannings, the internationally known, Swiss-born actor, who had left Germany in October 1926 to work for Paramount Pictures. During his two and a half...

Jul 13, 2010 — At the author’s request, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first. Nineteen thirty-six was a decisive year for imperial Japan, marked by extreme violence at home and abroad. In the very early morning of February 26,...

Sep 8, 2009 — “It’s not my fault that I’m Japanese . . . yet it’s my worst crime that I am!” The words are those of Kaji, hero of The Human Condition (1959–61), but in his anguish and existential despair, he also speaks...

Apr 21, 2009 — “Just takes a few months to get to be a hundred. If you’re in the right place at the right time.” I first saw Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece The Wages of Fear when the restored version was released in the U.S.,...

Oct 20, 2008 — Costa-Gavras’s film pointedly raised issues that for many people were only dimly in the air at the time, and which have become more and more unavoidable in recent years, as the United States has openly assumed its imperial role.

Aug 18, 2008 — This modest-scale psychological drama by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger follows an explosives expert with a drinking problem who harbors a great deal of bitterness.

Jan 21, 2008 — While Agnès Varda was prescient in picking up on the new social phenomenon of France’s young female drifters, she also anticipated the culture of extreme individualism that has come to dominate Western society since the 1980s.

Oct 15, 2007 — One of Spain’s most acclaimed and prolific directors, Carlos Saura emerged as an artist in the late 1950s under Franco’s dictatorship and immediately made his mark as an incisive, if necessarily allusive, social and political commentator.

Oct 6, 2007 — In Gus Van Sant’s first feature, gayness—blind, unembarrassed homosexual lust—is the narrative’s driving force.

Sep 29, 2003 — Fassbinder had long dreamed of a “German Hollywood film.” He sought not only success with the audience, but also professionalism. The auteur film in its purest form is an attempt to abolish the division of labor: the filmmaker represents in...