Chocolat

Sep 15, 2020 — When Claire Denis’s Beau travail (1999) first appeared on American screens, the critic Stephen Holden used a striking phrase to capture its embracing of bold opposites: “voluptuous austerity.” His characterization, widely quoted since, illuminates the film on many levels, and...

Mar 26, 2019 — As BAM prepares to present the largest U.S. retrospective yet, we look back on the singular oeuvre.

May 21, 2018 — W hether she’s pushing herself to new heights on stage and screen or nurturing her passions as a painter and poet, Juliette Binoche is as creatively voracious now as she’s ever been. Her combination of strength and disarming vulnerability as...

Apr 20, 2018 — “Although her oeuvre to date is wide-ranging,” writes Melissa Anderson at 4Columns, Claire Denis’s “most celebrated films are those that probe, usually elliptically, the legacy of French colonial rule in Africa, as seen in Chocolat (1988), her semiautobiographical debut feature;...

Apr 12, 2011 — A nightmare from which no one awakes, Claire Denis’ White Material (2009) takes place in a nameless African country teetering on the brink of all-out civil war. It is the veteran French director’s toughest work, unsparing with its characters and...

Aug 26, 2015 — Filmmaker Keith Gordon has directed the features The Chocolate War (1988), A Midnight Clear (1992), Mother Night (1996), Waking the Dead (2000), and The Singing Detective (2003), along with multiple episodes of the series Fargo, Homeland, The Leftovers, The Killing,...

Oct 28, 2025 — An adaptation of a classic pulp novel by William Lindsay Gresham, Guillermo del Toro’s first foray into film noir is an intensely evocative exploration of how human impulses can give rise to monsters.

Jun 6, 2025 — Wes Anderson celebrates Satyajit Ray, Chantal Akerman talks framing, and Callie Hernandez writes about Jonathan Glazer.

Jun 18, 2024 — In this stylish erotic noir, Lilly and Lana Wachowski delight in destabilizing our genre and gender expectations, laying the foundation for the trans sensibility that runs through all their work.

Oct 4, 2023 — Night has fallen in London, but the streets still teem with people. Through a second-story window, we watch as an elderly Jewish man who lives over a shop is stabbed to death and his rooms are set on fire. We...