The Best Years

Oct 1, 2014 — In the hands of director Serge Bourguignon, a potentially sensationalistic story becomes a poetic and complex investigation of love and pain.

Jun 27, 2014 — The American war in Vietnam was officially divided into two halves: the military war and “the other war: the war to win the hearts and minds of the people,” which gives Peter Davis’s 1974 documentary its title. Whereas the aim...

Feb 27, 2014 — Roman Polanski’s film is a highly sophisticated adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s classic novel, in both its faithfulness and its divergences.

Nov 12, 2013 — Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig create a luminous, romantic portrait of a young woman looking for fulfillment in New York City.

Oct 16, 2012 — After breaking out with Maria Full of Grace, filmmaker Joshua Marston visited a strange new land with persistent and deadly traditions.

Oct 4, 2012 — Louis Malle is remembered primarily as a fiction filmmaker, but he had a parallel career as a documentarian. In fact, he got his start in nonfiction: when he was just twenty-three years old, Malle was given the opportunity to collaborate...

Sep 25, 2012 — No mere jigsaw movie, David Fincher’s thriller is also a nuanced character study, a satire of corporate culture, and a film about filmmaking.

Oct 4, 2011 — Masaki Kobayashi rejects the notion of individual submission to the group, condemning the hierarchical structures that pervaded Japanese political and social life in the 1950s and 1960s.

May 16, 2011 — Among the most enduringly popular motives for murder, in films as in life, is the desire to remove an impediment to happiness—to get somebody, once and for all, out of the way. In life, of course, the goal of freeing...

May 25, 2010 — Between 1952 and 2003, depending on how the various serial works are counted, Stan Brakhage made somewhere between 350 and 400 films, about half of them short film poems under ten minutes in length, most of the rest between ten...