The Great War

Oct 23, 2014 — The author recalls meeting the filmmaker in a Swedish hotel in the ’70s.

Jun 25, 2013 — How Claude Lanzmann made a thoughtful film about the unthinkable and unfilmable.

Jun 15, 2020 — The hugely popular and prolific Italian actor Alberto Sordi relished playing rogues, characters riddled with foibles and weaknesses. In an interview with Positif’s Jean A. Gili in 1999, he revealed that his aim was to depict in a comic register...

Aug 28, 2006 — Pietro Germi’s brilliant satire skewers Italian society’s devotion to appearances and its cultlike obsession with gossip and honor.

Nov 28, 2022 — When Sight and Sound announces the results of its decennial poll this week, we’ll see what a list of all-time great films looks like in 2022.

Jan 10, 2018 — The director of the war masterpiece Come and See got his start lampooning social conformity in 1960s Soviet life. Two of his early-career gems are now available on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck.

Apr 28, 2010 — Just over halfway through Ang Lee’s masterful Civil War drama Ride with the Devil, the small group of men at the story’s center, young, Southern-sympathizing Bushwhackers fighting in divided Missouri, meet up with other ragtag bands of rebels. Coalescing under...

Apr 23, 2001 — A majestic synthesis of disparate forms, Sergei Eisenstein’s final film seems to be as much a ballet or a moving painting as it is a movie.

Oct 15, 2024 — This jolt of delicious weirdness from Japanese New Wave master Masahiro Shinoda is both a reverent salute to Kabuki and a self-consciously postmodern take on its traditions.

Sep 25, 2023 — This month brings collections on Straub-Huillet and Whit Stillman, an Anna May Wong biography, and a novel starring Marilyn Monroe.