Not of This Earth

Jul 16, 2013 — Theater legend Peter Brook’s approach to bringing the classic fable about human savagery to the screen was radical in its straightforwardness.

Sep 18, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s theatrical spectacle set in early nineteenth-century Paris is an operatic work about passion and artifice.

Mar 13, 2012 — In the becalmed atmosphere of today’s Hollywood, it’s hard to imagine the tumult that greeted The Last Temptation of Christ when it was released in 1988. Brilliantly directed by Martin Scorsese, this adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s imaginative retelling of the...

Aug 9, 2011 — Gillo Pontecorvo’s incendiary epic commemorates the popular uprising that had succeeded in ousting the French from Algeria in July 1962.

Feb 1, 2011 — When Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Véronique was first screened at Cannes, in 1991, the critical reception was rapturous. Georgia Brown declared in the Village Voice, “Anything I say about [the film] is merely a labored minuet danced around...

Mar 23, 2010 — In myriad inventive ways, Terrence Malick’s philosophical drama shows us how nature and culture are always intertwined.

Nov 2, 2009 — The following, written in 1986, is from the first treatment for Wings of Desire. And we, spectators always, everywhere,looking at, never out of, everything!—Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy” At first it’s not possible to describe anything beyond a wish or a...

Apr 14, 2008 — Allen Baron’s stark, moody Blast of Silence (1961) is a movie of many strange distinctions. It’s among the last of the true film noirs, those fatalistic black-and-white urban crime dramas that darkened the American screen so gloriously in the years...

Apr 24, 2000 — PREFACE Aman who dozes, his mouth half open, in front of a wood fire, lets slip some secrets from that night of the human body that is called the soul, over which he is no longer master. The sentry of...

Jun 29, 2026 — In the run-up to the country’s 250th birthday, several venues are offering prompts for celebration and reflection.