A Foreign Affair

Jun 17, 2022 — This week: Surrealism and cinema, a Cold War “travesty,” talking about Bruno, and walking in Hong Kong.

Nov 1, 2022 — A film of rich colors, mournful silences, and haunting symmetries, Wong Kar Wai’s masterpiece is a meticulously constructed memory box that invites fetishistic dissection.

Sep 24, 2013 — Marketed as a movie of volcanic passion, Roberto Rossellini’s first film with Ingrid Bergman is rather a pragmatic take on the negotiations of matrimony.

Oct 28, 2022 — The role of the vampire has given talented actors throughout film history—from Bela Lugosi to Catherine Deneuve—the chance to embody physical and moral extremity.

May 27, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so commonplace that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. Movies, however, reveal this action as more than just the original mode of getting from here to...

Sep 3, 2018 — The producers behind our edition of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s masterpiece share stories they discovered from researching the film and the turbulent political climate that inspired it.

Mar 15, 2016 — Set during the height of McCarthy-era paranoia and arriving in 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Frankenheimer’s high-anxiety Communist conspiracy thriller tapped into the darkest fears of Cold War America.

Jan 25, 2012 — Creating an effect of pity and terror unique in Francesco Rosi’s cinema, The Moment of Truth ought by rights to be counted among his finest achievements. On its original release in 1965, Pauline Kael acclaimed “the beauty of rage, masterfully...

Apr 15, 2019 — It’s one thing to have wild cinematic ambitions, and quite another to pursue them without a strong technical skill set and years of apprenticeship in the craft. But from the beginning of his career, the twenty-nine-year-old, mostly self-taught filmmaker Bi...

Apr 9, 2018 — Ingrid Bergman’s work in her native Sweden was an early showcase for her dazzlingly precocious talent and emotional depth.