Star!

Oct 4, 2004 — Robert Altman’s political satire, broadcast on HBO in mostly half-hour segments during the 1988 campaign season, is a sort of trompe l’oeil video chronicle of the constantly surprising presidential fight of an obscure Michigan Democratic congressmen.

Aug 2, 2004 — The three film’s in Renoir’s trilogy are comic period fantasies in dazzling color, offering a kind of continuous, bustling choreography in which shifting power relations between upper and lower classes and between spectators and performers literally turn the world into...

Aug 2, 2004 — Anna Magnani’s flair for demotic street comedy was transfigured into stylized nobility by sumptuous costuming and Jean Renoir’s formal camera work.

Aug 2, 2004 — This kinetic and ineffably voluptuous musical is the happiest and most exuberant ripple in Jean Renoir’s career as a river of personal expression.

Jul 19, 2004 — Marcel Carné's third feature is as epochal as any film made in France in the 1930s, exemplifying the style known as “poetic realism.”

Jun 21, 2004 — Indefatigably productive, ingenious, exasperating, narcissistically didactic, slyly self-promoting, abject, generous, exploitative, devoted to the wretched of the earth with honest fervor and deluded romanticism: Pier Paolo Pasolini can easily exhaust the adjective-prone, as man and artist, his person and his...

Apr 19, 2004 — “Floating weeds, drifting down the leisurely river of our lives,” has long been a favored metaphor in Japanese prose and poetry. This plant, the ukigusa (duckweed in English), floating aimlessly, carried by stronger currents, is seen as emblematic of our...

Mar 15, 2004 — This Japanese classic’s guiding passion is hunger, and its central image—a gaping black hole in the earth—is that of an all-consuming maw.

Mar 13, 2004 — With uncharacteristic warmth and affection for human frailty, Ingmar Bergman raises the question of how love can possibly last forever.

Feb 23, 2004 — Laurence Olivier’s last entry in his trilogy of Shakespeare films is the crowning glory of the British studio system and the end of the great cycle of British films aimed at international audiences.