The Fairy

Oct 10, 2017 — Two singing mermaid sisters take 1980s Poland by storm in this extravagantly mounted musical-horror hybrid.

Sep 27, 2016 — This monumental meditation on the Ten Commandments captures the spiritual undercurrents of life in late-Communist Poland.

Jul 28, 2014 — Jacques Demy’s first full-fledged storybook fantasy challenges and subverts traditional fairy-tale norms.

Jul 18, 2011 — Out of the extravagant variety of Jean Cocteau’s work—the paintings and drawings, the poems, the plays and novels and memoirs, the opera librettos and ballet scenarios—it is likely his films that will have the most enduring influence, and among those,...

Dec 5, 2005 — René Clément’s masterpiece is dedicated to the radical Freudian proposal that living matter seeks the comfort of oblivion.

Jun 3, 1991 — Jean Marais on the set of Beauty and the Beast An excerpt from Cocteau: A Biography (1970) by Francis Steegmuller Beauty and the Beast, the first film of Cocteau’s own since The Blood of a Poet, and his finest poem since...

Apr 29, 2026 — Deep Dives You look at Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979), and you see the snarky, risky spirit of the New Wave movements that emerged around the world in the 1960s and ’70s in full, defiant bloom. But what...

Jan 29, 2026 — Jonathan Glazer’s enigmatic second feature explores the terrors of being desperate for love—and the vulnerability, loneliness, and difficulty in understanding other people that might drive this state.

Apr 29, 2025 — Drawing from a rich tradition of films that depict the lives of sex workers, Sean Baker’s Oscar-winning triumph takes a complex approach to exploring the fundamentally transactional nature of human relationships.

Jul 15, 2022 — In her last significant film role, the art-house icon reveals an emotional vulnerability previously hidden by her ethereal persona.