The Station Agent

Feb 16, 2004 — In this quintessential noir, Samuel Fuller breaks with the Red Scare formula of his contemporaries by contrasting the faceless evil of Communism against the peccadilloes of the workaday American crook.

Jan 11, 2011 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Army of Shadows (1969) gives a dramatic account of the extreme dangers faced by the French who resisted the German occupation of 1940–1944. The time of the story is unspecified, but it is probably 1943, late enough...

Jul 21, 2008 — Akira Kurosawa’s modern adaptation of an American thriller represents a departure from his usual themes and stylistic choices.

Jun 16, 2008 — Decades later, we’ve come to understand that Claude Sautet’s film—in a less gaudy and obvious, more secretive, insidious way—was just as revolutionary as Breathless.

Jan 11, 1988 — Alfred Hitchcock committed a shocking murder in Sabotage (1936). Here, in one of the director’s darkest works, a child unknowingly carrying a bomb is blown to pieces in the streets of London. The death of Stevie is a deliberate attempt...

Jan 1, 2018 — One of the most intriguing films we can look forward to in the new year is Claire Denis’s English-language debut, High Life. “I’ve always been interested in science, in astrophysics,” Denis told the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough in November. “But...

Mar 15, 2016 — Set during the height of McCarthy-era paranoia and arriving in 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Frankenheimer’s high-anxiety Communist conspiracy thriller tapped into the darkest fears of Cold War America.

Dec 22, 2013 — The author reflects on his interactions with the great filmmaker.

Feb 11, 2022 — The director discusses the making of his 1979 cult road movie, Radio On, which is now streaming exclusively on the Criterion Channel, and the influence of New German Cinema on his visual style.

Mar 9, 2018 — Ryan Coogler is on the cover of the new March/April 2018 issue of Film Comment, and Devika Girish writes about how “the mythology of Black Panther is keenly attuned to the present even as it undoes the past: it is...