Signs of Life

Dec 18, 2016 — Imogen Sara Smith examines the tensions between tradition and modernity reflected in two silent crime films by Yasujiro Ozu and Tomu Uchida.

Aug 25, 2014 — Love and death tango in Bob Fosse’s glittering ode to his own mortality.

Apr 10, 2023 — Ian Penman’s new book Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is neither a straight-ahead biography nor an orderly critical analysis.

Jun 30, 2020 — A nonverbal man sits on a bench on a village street. With his hands, he tells the story of his village. His hands say that all of the villagers were herded together into a barn. His hands say that the...

Feb 18, 2020 — From the making of Chinatown, through fresh memoirs and ongoing biographies, here’s this month’s overview of new and noteworthy titles.

Dec 20, 2019 — This week we’re spotlighting directors’ and writers’ appreciations of other directors and writers, plus Céline Sciamma and Agnès Varda.

Jul 14, 2026 — The legacy of Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game has become inextricably entangled with a defining trope of AIDS-era mainstream queer representation: the revelation that exposes the gender identity of a transgender character. By the time of the American release of...

Jul 16, 2019 — When Alan J. Pakula began preparing for the production of Klute (1971), he screened a lot of Alfred Hitchcock films. He looked at Notorious and admired Ingrid Bergman’s work. He revisited Strangers on a Train, struggling with the climactic merry-go-round...

Feb 17, 2015 — It was never, of course, Yasujiro Ozu’s intention that An Autumn Afternoon (1962) should be the final film of his thirty-­five­-year career as a writer­-director. Indeed, before he died on his sixtieth birthday, in December 1963, he had made notes...

May 10, 2011 — Something Wild asks the eternal question “What makes us happy?” But the answer it proposes is far from easily arrived at. It’s a boy meets girl story, certainly, but one that goes much deeper with that narrative than most films...