In Name Only

Feb 27, 2013 — More than eighty films into his career, Kenji Mizoguchi made this emotionally devastating masterpiece, from a story by Ogai Mori.

Feb 22, 2013 — The writer shares his memories of his friendship with the great writer and Japanese cinema expert, who passed away this week.

Nov 20, 2012 — For a brief, shining moment, the genteel Japanese studio mutated into a fun house of grim ghouls and slimy aliens.

Jun 25, 2012 — For this Edinburgh-based writer and filmmaker, Hitchcock’s Scottish caper is both fantasy and reality.

May 23, 2012 — Iranian master director Abbas Kiarostami voyaged to Italy to make a film that questions love, relationships, and Western art cinema.

Apr 25, 2012 — Pearls of the Deep: Alumni AssociationIn the mid-1960s, there was a brief window during which a remarkable cinema of ideas and visual experimentation flourished in Communist Czechoslovakia. This fecund period lasted approximately five years, from 1963 to 1968, when it...

Mar 26, 2012 — A Night to Remember, the 1958 British film adaptation of Walter Lord’s 1955 book about the brief life and agonizing death of the Titanic, has proven unsinkable. With its Olympian yet unfailingly life-size view of the disaster that scuttled illusions...

Feb 22, 2012 — When it comes to depicting actual people’s jobs, the truism goes, Hollywood gets everything wrong with stunning regularity. The rare exception is Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), widely considered among the finest trial films ever made, and maybe...

Aug 31, 2011 — French sociologist Roger Caillois proposed that every form of human recreation could be placed somewhere on a continuum between two terms: ludus and paidia. The first of these represents games defined almost wholly by their rule systems. Crossword puzzles and...

Jul 18, 2011 — Out of the extravagant variety of Jean Cocteau’s work—the paintings and drawings, the poems, the plays and novels and memoirs, the opera librettos and ballet scenarios—it is likely his films that will have the most enduring influence, and among those,...