Face to Face with Death

Apr 25, 2011 — Brian De Palma brought hip, freewheeling funkiness to the American film renaissance of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Wised-up, cinema-savvy audiences across the country knew to seek out his movies for their scruffy wit, showmanship, and aesthetic innovation, not...

Feb 1, 2011 — When Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Véronique was first screened at Cannes, in 1991, the critical reception was rapturous. Georgia Brown declared in the Village Voice, “Anything I say about [the film] is merely a labored minuet danced around...

Sep 15, 2009 — Words are the trained fleas in David Mamet’s sidewalk circus—dirty words, often bloodstained, usually swarming, that perform their acrobatic stunts for gawkers who will likely get their pockets picked. That’s the reputation, anyhow. More than thirty years after he made...

Feb 18, 2008 — At the climax of Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), a helicopter descends from the night sky onto a plaza where the colonial buildings are ablaze and an army of mercenaries is disintegrating . . .

Oct 15, 2013 — Georges Franju’s masterpiece is the most chilling expression in cinema of our ancient preoccupation with the nature of identity.

Aug 16, 2017 — French New Wave icon Jeanne Moreau possessed a stillness, a way of surrendering to the camera, that made her utterly unique among modern actors.

Oct 2, 2025 — In Wes Anderson’s romantic ode to journalism, the director grapples with the danger and horror inherent in any field of endeavor worth pursuing.

Sep 20, 2024 — With their virtuosic celebrations of death, giallo films reflect the air of paranoia and fear that haunted Italian society in the 1960s and ’70s, a period when the country was undergoing dramatic, violent changes.

Mar 2, 2023 — The Film Forum series spotlights Moreau’s close working relationships with Louis Malle, François Truffaut, Orson Welles, and Marguerite Duras.

Jun 8, 2022 — A major figure in contemporary Hindi literature pays tribute to Guru Dutt in this fantasia that reimagines the great filmmaker’s death.