May 15, 2000 Twenty-five years after its first appearance, Bergman’s film of The Magic Flute remains the finest screen version of an opera ever produced. Shot in sumptuous color by Sven Nykvist, and featuring some of the finest Nordic singers of the day,...

Seven Samurai

Essays

Nov 22, 1999 Breathtaking, fastmoving, and overflowing with a delightfully self-mocking sense of humor, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is one of the most popular and influential Japanese films ever made. Released in 1954, this rip-snorting action-adventure epic about a sixteenth-century farm community led...

Nov 15, 1999 Great comedy cannot be confined within normally accepted boundaries of taste and sensitivity. The essence of the Pythons was that they were always ready to take on formidable, daunting subjects that others might find too dangerous to contemplate. The idea...

Henry V

Essays

Jun 21, 1999 Laurence Olivier’s Henry V today seems like nothing less than a miracle in answer to the Chorus’s call for “a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.” It’s a dazzling adaptation of a Shakespeare play, made...

Annie Hall

Essays

Dec 3, 1990 Over the years I have had a recurrent nightmare in which I am summoned to a large, unfamiliar building in a middle-European satellite country (Bulgaria, perhaps) to tell the idea of Annie Hall to the Bulgarian Minister of Green Lights,...

Ikiru

Essays

Nov 19, 1990 By facing death, Akira Kurosawa fashions an affirmation of life, characteristically clear-headed in its exploration of man’s fate.

It All Started Here

Short Takes

Apr 18, 2011 In this photograph of the Brattle Theatre circa 1953, you can see a sign that says “Opening Soon! Foreign Films.” The brilliant idea behind the sign belonged to Harvard classmates Cy Harvey and Bryant Haliday, without whom the Brattle Theatre...

Summertime

Essays

Sep 8, 1998 In David Lean’s Summertime, in which Rossano Brazzi seduces Katharine Hepburn—an aging, repressed Ohio “working girl” on vacation in Venice—the Continental lover reached his pinnacle and approached his end. In the next decade, he would be embodied by Marcello Mastroianni,...

Jun 11, 2012 Charlie Chaplin’s transcendent, visionary comedy is made up of one iconic moment after another.

Apr 9, 2026 Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art introduce New Yorkers to some of the most exciting new voices in cinema.

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