Pioneer

Nov 16, 2010 — The Night of the Hunter (1955)—the first film directed by Charles Laughton and also, sadly, the last—is among the greatest horror movies ever made, and perhaps, of that select company, the most irreducibly American in spirit. It’s about those venerable...

Oct 23, 2010 — In 1945, a teenage Stanley Kubrick was given a job as staff photographer at Look magazine, where he published more than nine hundred striking images, most of them in the realist style of New York School street photography. By the...

In a national cinema dominated by behemoth Hollywood studios, independently produced films have always made for refreshing alternatives.

Oct 19, 2009 — Though known primarily for her wildly varied, continent-hopping features (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, Vanity Fair, The Namesake), Indian director Mira Nair has for the past three decades also been forging a parallel career of short filmmaking. Both fiction (Migration, How...

May 5, 2009 — French filmmaker Julien Duvivier is undoubtedly best known for the 1937 classic Pépé le Moko, starring Jean Gabin. But many film lovers today have seen little else by this poetic realist pioneer, a victim, Michael Atkinson writes in an insightful...

Apr 20, 2009 — The French scientist-educator-filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s groundbreaking work consistently revealed not only a commitment to informed science and effective communication but to the creative expression of ideas.

One of cinema’s great modern directors, this larger-than-life maestro created an inimitable cinematic style combining surreal carnival with incisive social critique.

This explosion of vibrant, innovative, and highly self-conscious films from France in the late 1950s and early 1960s changed the game.

Jan 21, 2008 — Agnès Varda seizes the kind of immediacy and tension associated, at the start of the sixties, with the cinema verité documentary movement and uses it to create a new form of fiction.

Sep 17, 2007 — Today we are used to seeing dance artistically presented on television and in movies—these films about Martha Graham helped to make that happen.