That Brief Summer

Oct 30, 2012 — All of them actors? Nearly everyone wears a mask in Roman Polanski’s devilishly clever work of horror.

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

Dec 1, 2009 — The first words we hear are Sam Cutler’s: “Everybody seems to be ready—are we ready?” We were nowhere near ready for what was to come, there at the bitter end of the sixties. I remember that rainy day so well,...

Jan 21, 2008 — As late as 1970, Alf Sjöberg’s boldly experimental 1951 adaptation of August Strindberg’s play was declared as inaugurating “a new cinematic language.”

Sep 3, 2007 — It came from nowhere, it’s always been here—or so Stranger Than Paradise might seem.Jim Jarmusch had completed his first feature, Permanent Vacation, in 1980 and spent the next four years working on his second. Screened a few times as a...

Apr 23, 1990 — Paying little attention to civilized rules of cinema, and with a bit more than one million dollars, Steven Soderbergh expresses all his hidden anxieties in this indie classic.

Mar 26, 2021 — In her hypnotic, uncategorizable films, the director serves as a channel for images that emerge from deep within her unconscious.

Sep 18, 2025 — No movie star was bigger in the 1970s, and he won an Oscar for directing Ordinary People. But Sundance may be his most impactful legacy.

Feb 24, 2025 — Todd Haynes’s jury gives the Berlinale’s top awards to films by Dag Johan Haugerud, Gabriel Mascaro, Iván Fund, Huo Meng, and Radu Jude.

Sep 21, 2010 — Warrendale: Man of ActionAllan King was one of cinema’s most acute chroniclers of unadorned reality, but the term documentary seems too puny to describe the intense, passionate stories he contrived to fashion from that reality. King’s early nonfiction features are...