Look at Me

Jul 11, 2005 — Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short story balances realism and fantasy.

Jan 10, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki made a breakthrough with his second feature, a yakuza thriller full of devil-may-care assurance and try-anything imagination.

Apr 19, 2004 — “Floating weeds, drifting down the leisurely river of our lives,” has long been a favored metaphor in Japanese prose and poetry. This plant, the ukigusa (duckweed in English), floating aimlessly, carried by stronger currents, is seen as emblematic of our...

Sep 23, 2002 — Anticipating reality TV, Rémy Belvaux’s faux cinema verité satire follows a film crew documenting a mass murderer’s rampage.

Jun 4, 2001 — Mad with images of nature in rebellion, Luis Buñuel’s 1964 film is a droll vision of Eden during the Fall starring a sumptuous Jeanne Moreau.

Feb 19, 2001 — Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s romance film spins a web of myth and evocative symbolism around its central search for self-discovery.

Jan 29, 2001 — Masahiro Shinoda’s historical drama uses traditional elements of Japanese theater to explore the tension between ethics and eroticism.

Nov 22, 1999 — Grand Illusion is the masterpiece that earned Jean Renoir enormous acclaim in the United States, exciting the admiration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and running for 26 weeks in New York after its opening in September 1938. Banned in Italy...

Nov 23, 1998 — Harold Shand, the London crime boss at the center of The Long Good Friday, is more than an antihero. He’s the Antichrist, uniting bourgeoisie and barbarians in a simultaneous Pax and Pox Brittanica. With the “legitimate” help of cops and...

Oct 12, 1998 — Are there cultural purists still remaining who would argue that the “Westernized” title of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 masterpiece—High and Low—throws polluted water on the cosmological fire of its given name: Tengoku to jigoku—literally, Heaven and Hell?Kurosawa’s once insisted-upon reputation as...