Us and Them

Oct 24, 2005 — Kihachi Okamoto’s dynamic, intricately madcap movie is a multitoned send-up of samurai film lore.

May 15, 2000 — In René Clair’s ebullient early talkie, an unsentimental love of humanity permeates every frame.

Jan 10, 2000 — The Night Porter is a provocative and problematic film. Made in 1974 by Italian director Liliana Cavani, it can be seen as an exercise in perversion and exploitation of the Holocaust for the sake of sensationalism. On the other hand,...

Jan 11, 1999 — David Lean followed his prodigious adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations with this brilliant crystallization of Dickens’ Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy’s Progress. It deploys the cinema’s special powers of dash and immediacy to convey all the venturesomeness and...

Aug 12, 1991 — It is 1945. For the first time in four years, the Southern Pacific stops in Black Rock.  A one-armed man named John J. MacReedy (Spencer Tracy) steps off the train. This brooding stranger makes the few residents who inhabit the...

Jul 24, 2018 — A feast of sumptuous color and cinematic imagination, Powell and Pressburger’s postwar masterpiece is also a powerful reckoning with recent history.

Nov 8, 2016 — This adaptation of one of the most influential series in manga history is a delirious mix of breathtaking swordplay and pop vulgarity.

Jul 21, 2008 — Akira Kurosawa’s modern adaptation of an American thriller represents a departure from his usual themes and stylistic choices.

May 6, 2025 — A two-part, thirty-film retrospective opens in New York before traveling to Berkeley, Harvard, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Jan 31, 2025 — As an Australian classic turns fifty, we’re also reading about Leos Carax and Catherine Breillat.