Ascension

Sep 10, 2017 — “Fear rises like gas from a corpse in Armando Iannucci’s brilliant horror-satire The Death of Stalin,” begins the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “It’s a sulphurous black comedy about the backstairs Kremlin intrigue that followed the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953,...

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.

Sep 13, 2016 — Kenji Mizoguchi achieved the sublime with this structurally complex portrait of artistic ambition and female subjugation.

May 7, 2015 — Movie comedies about moviemaking through the decades

Nov 28, 2010 — “What we need are good old American—and that’s not to be confused with European—Art Films.” So declared the then twenty-nine-year-old beatnik Method actor Dennis Hopper in an unpublished 1965 manifesto. “The whole damn country’s one big real place to utilize...

Apr 27, 2009 — Stephen Frears’s gangland drama subverts its genre by removing its villains to an alternate mythic universe, that of the western, as its protagonists traverse the roads that snake through Spain’s arid hills and plains.

Mar 19, 2007 — In 1945 Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, a canny and gifted tabloid newspaper photographer, did something unprecedented: he assembled some of his best shots, of corpses and fires and arrests and crowds and spectacles, and made them into a book,...

Aug 12, 2025 — This remarkably sensitive yet jarringly violent romance epitomizes director Youssef Chahine’s late-fifties hybrid style, which combined elements of Hollywood entertainment with an unmistakably Egyptian spirit.

May 21, 2021 — Known for her resilient heroines, the prolific Japanese actor finds agency through moments of hesitation in one of her seventeen collaborations with Mikio Naruse.