Man Above Men

Feb 27, 2013 — More than eighty films into his career, Kenji Mizoguchi made this emotionally devastating masterpiece, from a story by Ogai Mori.

Sep 8, 2009 — “It’s not my fault that I’m Japanese . . . yet it’s my worst crime that I am!” The words are those of Kaji, hero of The Human Condition (1959–61), but in his anguish and existential despair, he also speaks...

Oct 18, 2004 — Nixon as Hamlet, Nixon as Lear, Nixon as Blanche DuBois, Nixon as Krapp—clutching every last tape to his breast with the wild fury and despair of a man on the precipice . . . Nixon in his study, poring over...

Jan 7, 1991 — Vittorio de Sica remembers the inspirations behind and the making of his classic film.

Jul 22, 2026 — In his fiction features Beginners, 20th Century Women, and C’mon C’mon, the acclaimed director casts a sensitive gaze on the rich psychodynamics of human relationships and the hidden interconnections of our unconscious motivations.

Apr 17, 2026 — From a distance—looking down, say, from a penthouse office in a glass-paned downtown skyscraper—the U.S. economy of the 1990s and early 2000s could feel almost boring. Between Black Monday in 1987 and the Global Financial Crisis twenty years later, growth...

Nov 1, 2023 — Sandra Hüller meets Joachim Trier, Hayao Miyazaki predicts the future, and MoMA showcases Iranian cinema.

Nov 15, 2017 — At the American Film Festival that wrapped a couple of weeks ago in Wroclaw, Poland, IndieWire’s Eric Kohn has had early looks at four works in progress: Writer-director-cinematographer John Maringouin’s Ghost Box Cowboy, “an often absurdist commentary about capitalism gone...

May 26, 2008 — Though producer Alexander Korda’s adventure movie forms part of a continued tradition of representing the East by purposefully occluding the reality of it, it celebrates the Arabian fantasy as a site of childlike wonder.

Sep 25, 2023 — There was a period under the Nixon administration when the collective American psyche, as seen on film, seemed almost convulsed by its fixation on the motor vehicle. Every other week a moviegoer might see a film that could broadly be...