The Documentary

Jan 14, 2015 — The writer remembers two New York film figures.

May 19, 2014 — As in his other films, the world of Abbas Kiarostami’s latest is one of simulation, not-quite-realness, and unexpected tenderness.

May 12, 2014 — The Italian cinema expert describes the immense popularity of Dino Risi’s film in its home country, and the way it deepened the commedia all’italiana genre.

Sep 23, 2013 — The neorealist master and the Hollywood icon forged a brilliant artistic path together, despite the backlash their controversial romance generated.

Jun 25, 2013 — How Claude Lanzmann made a thoughtful film about the unthinkable and unfilmable.

Nov 15, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled...

A founder of Italian neorealism, this Italian master brought to filmmaking a documentary-like authenticity and philosophical stringency that came to define modern cinema.

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...

Nov 27, 2010 — The New Jersey resort town of Atlantic City provides the backdrop for two distinctive films made at opposite ends of the seventies: Bob Rafelson’s 1972 The King of Marvin Gardens and Louis Malle’s Atlantic City, released in 1981. That decade...

Nov 3, 2009 — If ever there was a European art film that could be all things to all people, it’s Wim Wenders’s 1987 masterpiece.