Notorious

Sep 3, 2015 — Wes Craven, who died this week at age seventy-six, was a horror master with few equals in contemporary American movies. The director of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream may not often be spoken of in the same breath...

May 21, 2015 — Repertory PicksWhen cinematographic genius Max Ophuls made his first Technicolor, CinemaScope extravaganza (also, sadly, his last, due to his death), he pulled out all the stops. Lola Montès, his ravishing biopic of the notorious nineteenth-century courtesan, is the kind of...

May 11, 2015 — The poignancy of Leo McCarey's tearjerker is due as much to the director's scrupulous aesthetic choices as his unforgettable characters and story.

Apr 29, 2015 — Peter Yates's crime drama is a haunting, singular experience, brutal and minutely observed, with a remarkably authentic sense of place.

Mar 11, 2015 — More than thirty years after his death in 1977, Roberto Rossellini is remembered by your average film buff as the father of Italian neo­realism (Rome, Open City, 1945; Paisan, 1946; Germany Year Zero, 1948) and of actress and model Isabella...

May 1, 2014 — When Walter Wanger conceived the movie that would become Riot in Cell Block 11, he wasn’t thinking in terms of pop culture. The longtime independent film producer, with classics (and Criterion releases) such as Stagecoach and Foreign Correspondent to his...

Mar 4, 2014 — The great documentarian Claude Lanzmann’s new movie, made from footage he didn’t use in Shoah, provides a fascinating glipse at the way he began that monumental project.

Feb 28, 2014 — Other first films exude the sparkling joy of filmmaking that one feels in Breathless, but how many can boast its sure-handedness?

Feb 24, 2014 — A film of explosive passions, Abdellatif Kechiche’s coming-of-age triumph is about much more than just physical pleasure.

Dec 13, 2013 — Metin Erksan’s shocking and sensuous tale of greed and rural life was part of a vibrant Turkish cinema of the fifties and sixties.