Dark Figure of Crime

Jun 16, 2014 — Georges Franju evokes the surreal silent serials of Louis Feuillade while constructing his own personal cinematic paradise.

Apr 23, 2009 — These profiles of the real-life Sada Abé and the actress who portrayed her in Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses first appeared in Donald Richie’s 1987 book Different People: Pictures of Some Japanese, and can also be found...

Jul 19, 2004 — Marcel Carné's third feature is as epochal as any film made in France in the 1930s, exemplifying the style known as “poetic realism.”

Dec 17, 2025 — This January, savor multiple levels of nostalgia with a survey of ’90s cinema’s riffs on the ’70s, or turn a new page with a collection of films about dreamers seeking fresh starts in life.

Oct 28, 2025 — The first of Arturo Ripstein’s films to receive wider international acclaim, this blood-soaked, surrealist vision of amour fou harks back to the director’s roots as an admirer and protégé of Luis Buñuel.

May 16, 2023 — Inspired by golden-age monster movies and the story of a real-life mass murderer, Peter Bogdanovich’s debut feature evokes the psychic dread of America in the 1960s, a decade defined by long-distance and increasingly high-profile gun violence.

Aug 23, 2022 — With one foot in naturalism and the other in dreams and poetry, Marcel Carné’s visually rousing drama is an ode to the daily vicissitudes of ordinary Parisians.

Jun 1, 2022 — With his love of dissonance and bold use of dramatic motifs, the Hungarian-born composer Miklós Rózsa popularized a whole new style of film music.

Nov 17, 2021 — Decades after Peter Lorre’s knife-toting creep Hans Beckert prowled the Berlin streets in search of little girls in Fritz Lang’s M (1931); after Robert Mitchum’s silver-tongued Harry Powell cut down all the “smooth and curly-haired things” he could get his...

Nov 17, 2020 — Consider Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) as a very promiscuous romance picture above anything else—even if not all of its many objects of affection are what you might call properly human and there is no...