His Brother

Oct 24, 2005 — Mirroring changes in awareness, politics, and lifestyle occurring across the globe, the chanbara (or Japanese swordplay film) underwent a significant metamorphosis in the early 1960s, acquiring a decidedly more radical spirit. Seemingly without warning, groundbreaking cinematic styles from beyond the...

Sep 13, 2004 — The following piece by Sony Pictures Classics cofounder and copresident Michael Barker, who picked up Slacker for Orion Classics in 1991, originally appeared in the program for the 2001 Austin Film Society event Slacker: A Ten-Year Reunion. What I’ve found...

Feb 19, 2001 — Leaving the theater after the tumultuous world premiere of Do the Right Thing at Cannes in May of 1989, I found myself too shaken to speak, and I avoided the clusters of people where arguments were already heating up. One...

Oct 18, 1994 — Val Lewton’s cinematic diamond-in-the-rough has been recognized for decades as a definitive chiller, but it was conceived as a title, with no story or notion in mind, and as a way of generating cash for RKO.

Mar 9, 1992 — The ads for Boyz N the Hood, the debut of a 23-year old writer-director named John Singleton, treated the film as if it took place in another galaxy—a mysterious fiefdom far, far away. And so it does, set in a...

Jan 7, 1991 — Roman Polanski’s riposte to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was greeted as a brilliant, grisly potboiler that gave the thirty-two-year-old Polish filmmaker commercial entry to the West.

Dec 2, 1990 — In Martin Scorsese’s hands, the camera is not simply a recording device, but an x-ray machine—and it shows us close-ups of the human soul.

Nov 12, 2024 — Filled with expressionistic shadows and pungent details of life in the criminal underworld, this seminal tale of money and violence was among director Howard Hawks’s favorite of his own films.

Sep 6, 2024 — Alex Cox discusses his first and next films, Warhol rarities screen in New York, and a courtroom drama revisits the culture wars of 1970s France.

Jun 27, 2023 — With a divided self that reflected the fissures in his country in the wake of World War II, the most courageous and dangerous Italian artist of his generation transcended dogma and resisted affiliations.