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Aug 19, 2009 — I Am Waiting: Port of Call The year: 1957. The city: Yokohama, not far from the piers. The sound of the tide softly lapping against stones in the darkness, cubes of black ice in a tumbler of foam. Night. Rain....

Aug 18, 2009 — In the late 1970s, during the long years of waiting for international and domestic funding to come together to produce Kagemusha, Akira Kurosawa returned to the pastime of his youth—he painted. Working fast and furiously, each day turning out scores...

Aug 17, 2009 — Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece, a mesmerizing study of stasis and containment, time and domestic anxiety. Stretching its title character’s daily household routine in long, stark takes, Akerman’s film simultaneously allows viewers to...

Jul 27, 2009 — We enter Roman Polanski’s harrowing Repulsion as if in the middle of the story, but it’s actually the beginning of the end. Polanski unceremoniously drops us into a beauty salon where a pampered matron takes to task our heroine, a...

Jul 21, 2009 — Jean-Luc Godard’s essay follows twenty-four hours in Juliette’s life, beginning and ending in the evening in the apartment she shares with her husband and two young children.

Jul 16, 2009 — The venerable critic Andrew Sarris, now eighty-one years old, gets his due in a lovely profile in the New York Times by Michael Powell (no, not that one). This die-hard auteurist, who has contributed writing and been featured in on-screen...

Jul 14, 2009 — The decade-long Apollo program was the largest and most expensive undertaking in the history of man that wasn’t devoted to a war. During the four years between 1968 and 1972, there were nine manned flights to the moon. Twenty-four men...

Jul 14, 2009 — Tough title to live up to. The lofty three-word phrase Al Reinert chose for his 1989 documentary on the Apollo space program comes from the plaque the first men on the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, left there in...

Jul 8, 2009 — I’ll never forget that first step on the moon. I was at the home of a high school classmate in Fort Worth on the evening of July 20, 1969. The Eagle had landed that afternoon, and we’d been waiting for...

Jun 15, 2009 — With the arrival of this film, cinema catapulted to the front line of a cultural advance guard that sought to undermine the intractable mass taste promoted by Hollywood, television, and the Brill Building.