THE FIRST SOUND

Aug 18, 2014 — The filmmaker and critic discuss the pleasures and provocations of the Spanish auteur’s work.

Dec 3, 2013 — This scathing drama about a toxic society established Elio Petri as an important director of popular political entertainment in Italy.

Jun 9, 2023 — A rebel actress, a lost oeuvre, and a pornographic remake are among this week’s highlights.

Jun 6, 2012 — A killer breakfast

Jun 7, 1993 — For as long as images have flickered on a screen, romance has been the ever-beating heart of the filmgoing experience, and audiences never seem to tire of seeing lovers in each other’s arms. Yet when it comes to the most...

Feb 14, 2022 — A ’20s jazz hit provides a rare moment of peace in Howard Hawks’s frenzied screwball comedy.

May 24, 2016 — In The Player, Robert Altman’s early nineties comeback film, the director brilliantly skewers Hollywood—getting all the details right, as only he could—while constructing his own kind of Hollywood Movie.

May 6, 2022 — This week: Tarkovsky’s answer to Kubrick, the Otolith Group, Brooklyn filmmakers, German scenes, and Béatrice Dalle.

Jan 18, 2011 — In his Life Studies poem “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” Robert Lowell wrote of “free-lancing out along the razor’s edge,” a lean, glamorous, tense phrasing that invokes the Samuel Fuller of the early sixties—a director suddenly without...

Jul 10, 2006 — In his unpredictable daily encounters with the gorilla Koko and her teacher, Barbet Schroeder foregrounds the quiddity of Koko’s situation in episodic fashion.