The Way We Are

Sep 29, 2003 — Fassbinder had long dreamed of a “German Hollywood film.” He sought not only success with the audience, but also professionalism. The auteur film in its purest form is an attempt to abolish the division of labor: the filmmaker represents in...

Aug 18, 2003 — One of the Swedish director’s most representative works, this drama’s portentousness, banked intensity, and recondite symbolism come near to embodying the popular stereotype of the Bergmanesque.

Aug 18, 2003 — The two versions of Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist romance offer case studies in Hollywood and European sensibilities as they existed in the early 1950s.

Apr 28, 2003 — François Truffaut’s third Antoine Doinel installment is a perpetual juggling act by which harsh truths are disguised as light jokes.

Sep 3, 2001 — The Maysles Brothers’ documentary classic exposes the diurnal rituals and disappointments of American men of a certain generation.

Aug 20, 2001 — Before Lars von Trier, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson there was Carl Th. Dreyer. The first great film artist to pursue the ineffable in cinema, Dreyer gave depth to what early silent filmmakers innately understood yet took...

Aug 20, 2001 — Carl Dreyer considers the work of art’s soul in this excerpt from Dreyer in Double Reflection.

Jan 29, 2001 — In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s drama, the characters abandon their twin faiths, in God and the British Empire, and turn themselves over to more ancient and dangerous powers.

Sep 30, 1992 — The unprecedented popularity of this gender-bending sex farce inspired two sequels, a hit Broadway musical, and at least one transvestite nightclub.

Dec 2, 1991 — Director Akira Kurosawa had wanted to make Throne of Blood for some time. “After finishing Rashomon [in 1950] I wanted to do something with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but just about that time Orson Welles’s version was announced, so I postponed mine.”...