Our Life

Jun 24, 2014 — One of the most important contributions Peter Davis’s Hearts and Minds makes to our national dialogue on the Vietnam War is its portrayal of ordinary Vietnamese. For years, the Vietnamese had been conspicuous by their absence in American film and...

Jun 23, 2014 — Peter Davis’s provocative, Oscar-winning Hearts and Minds, released to the American public in 1974, is that rare documentary whose truths and relevance have been underlined and amplified by the passage of time. The title is derived from President Lyndon B....

Jun 9, 2014 — In the history of cinema, there have been several notable collaborations between a director and an actress over a series of films. Think of D. W. Griffith and Lillian Gish back in the silent era, Josef von Sternberg and Marlene...

Jun 9, 2014 — Your vigilance as an artist is an amorous vigilance, a vigilance of desire.—Roland Barthes to Michelangelo Antonioni, 1979 It’s lamentable that Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the most fashionable vanguard European filmmakers during the sixties, has mainly been out of fashion...

Jun 2, 2014 — One Scene When I first heard about The Human Condition (1959–61), I was already familiar with director Masaki Kobayashi’s irreverent Harakiri (1962), a favorite film of mine where samurai are scum of the earth and honor is equivalent to dirt....

Apr 29, 2014 — One legendary American director pays tribute to another.

Apr 27, 2014 — A leading light of commedia all’italiana, Dino Risi specialized in fleet, satirical takes on contemporary Italian culture, and this road-trip smash was his most trenchant.

Apr 24, 2014 — Film scholar extraordinaire David Bordwell is among our most meticulous writers on the art of cinema, looking closely at the construction of a film to see what makes it work and how its technical approach reflects its historical moment. We...

Apr 18, 2014 — The following interview, conducted by Stig Björkman, originally appeared in Björkman’s 1999 book Trier on von Trier.

Apr 14, 2014 — Lars von Trier brought his brand of provocation to his widest audience yet with this inquiry into faith and human goodness.