In the Cut

Nov 7, 2005 — Often appearing on lists of the ten greatest films of all time, called one of the most beautiful films ever made, or the most masterful work of Japanese cinema, Ugetsu comes to us awash in superlatives. No less acclaimed has...

Jun 27, 2005 — Ko Nakahira’s Nikkatsu Studio youth flick helped transform postwar Japanese cinema.

Jan 17, 2005 — Jacques Becker’s crime film contains plenty of the requisite genre elements—double-crossings, violence, kidnappings, and gun battles—but it’s also a pensive meditation on age, friendship, and lost opportunities.

Oct 4, 2004 — Robert Altman’s political satire, broadcast on HBO in mostly half-hour segments during the 1988 campaign season, is a sort of trompe l’oeil video chronicle of the constantly surprising presidential fight of an obscure Michigan Democratic congressmen.

Sep 13, 2004 — About a year and a half ago, a friend and I found ourselves exiled to a cold Midwestern city, where we spent most of our time missing the lazy Texas college town that shaped our idea of the good life....

Feb 2, 2004 — A story about defeat and failure, Robert Bresson’s masterpiece is a milestone in the slow process of the liberation of postwar French cinema

Jun 23, 2003 — Alain Resnais’s antidocumentary never purports to “document” the heinous realities of the Holocaust; instead, it interrogates our responses.

Feb 14, 2002 — Robert Bresson’s second feature is fixed in history as one of the movies that heralded an austere, modernistic way of seeing and feeling.

Nov 19, 2001 — Luis Buñuel’s drama is a seductive work that exemplifies, even as it studies, the perversity of human desire.

Jun 3, 2001 — Jacques Tati’s singular satire is a series of giddy encounters between people and things in which the wonders of “modern life” relinquish their functionality in favor of an unaccountably rapturous beauty.