* Northern Pursuit

Jun 20, 2017 — At the dawn of sound cinema, French theater titan Marcel Pagnol immortalized his epic vision of his native Provence in three exquisite humanist dramas.

May 24, 2017 — “Love them or hate them, the films of Bruno Dumont never cease to confound,” begins Jordan Mintzer in the Hollywood Reporter. “For a long time the 59-year-old auteur was known for his uncompromising—and uncompromisingly bleak—early works like The Life of...

Jul 25, 2014 — Erik Skjoldbjærg’s sun-drenched noir follows a detective trying to conceal his amoral actions amid unforgiving daylight.

Nov 13, 2012 — Moving to Chaucer’s gray-skied England, Pier Paolo Pasolini pushed his trilogy into darker realms.

Apr 13, 2012 — Performances Fists in the Pocket, a gasp-inducing, mouth-frothing, black-comic attack on bourgeois values, is remembered first and foremost as a shocking debut from director Marco Bellocchio. But it gave its star, Lou Castel, a memorable entrance of his own: he...

Sep 22, 2009 — A new era in popular music deserves a new era in filmmaking—that’s the basis of the perfect, fortuitous match-up between rock and cinema in D.A. Pennebaker’s concert film.

May 20, 2009 — Early in Shohei Imamura’s Intentions of Murder, the librarian Riichi distractedly peruses Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization while conversing with his clinging mistress, Yoshiko. One can read the reference in many ways: as a glancing jest, as an (uncharacteristic) Imamurian...

Dec 4, 1995 — While Carol Reed’s psychological noir is the most compassionate of movies, it’s a poetic summary of twentieth century harshness—of what can be called the inhuman condition.

Apr 1, 2026 — BAMPFA presents a retrospective in conjunction with the filmmaker’s residency at UC Berkeley.

Oct 16, 2025 — This month, join us for a Thanksgiving feast of some of the movies’ most memorable family reunions, or delve into the dark alleyways of noir mysteries built around protagonists tormented by amnesia, memory holes, and drunken blackouts.