† This is the Life

Aug 14, 2006 — La collectionneuse is a strong, sensuously lush, deceptively slight film, a Riviera fruit with a bitter, uncompromising aftertaste. In retrospect, it is both classically Rohmeresque and atypical, as befits a film in which the director was still finding his way....

Oct 24, 2005 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s great film flirts with macho extremism and slips over into dream and poetry just as it has us most alarmed.

Jun 13, 2005 — Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. The film’s steady accumulation of incident,...

Jun 7, 1999 — From the moment of its first appearance, at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959—where it won the Palme d’Or—it was clear that Black Orpheus was a very special film. Taking the ancient Greek myth of a youth who travels to...

Oct 19, 1998 — Jean-Luc Godard’s stripped-down science-fiction drama depicts a computer-controlled society at war with artists, thinkers, and lovers.

Jun 24, 1990 — Some films have become famous simply because they’ve sold a lot of tickets. Others have major studio publicity machines behind them, the better to hog the spotlight. Still others earn their fame the hard way through genuine critical acclaim. But...

Jul 18, 2018 — Alan Rudolph is a pioneer in the American independent film movement. He has directed nineteen narrative features and one feature-length documentary. His films have been presented in major international festivals for forty years and are noted for their fluid style,...

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the best-selling memoir In the Dream House and the short-story collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for a National Book Award. Her essays, fiction, poetry, and criticism have appeared...

Dec 15, 2023 — Pedro Almodóvar looks back, Roy Andersson empathizes, and Alice Diop addresses the state of cinema.

Aug 28, 2020 — This week’s highlights feature paintings brought to life, pioneering citizen journalists, early “race films,” and the first Japanese wave.