Poison

Jul 2, 2015 — By recounting the impossibility of making a movie, Federico Fellini ended up creating a masterpiece that almost fell into his lap.

Jan 13, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s characters play an endlessly layered game of dress-up in this tale of sadomasochistic love.

Aug 26, 2014 — Define the Japanese New Wave however you like—there are innumerable possible launching points, and the name players in the fifties and sixties were old and young and in between—but from any juncture, Shohei Imamura was a primary figure and, at...

Jul 15, 2014 — Ihave an unusually easy way of remembering when I first became fascinated by Robert Bresson’s films. Pickpocket (1959) was the first one I saw, at the old Orson Welles theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in my late teens; it was also...

May 5, 2014 — The celebrated divot points manfully toward the crest of the next hill, and the next, and the next, and to the horizon after that. Always forward! Into the sunset! Kirk Douglas is on the move: a wagon train of grimace,...

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

Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...

Nov 13, 2012 — With this frenetic cinematic fresco, Pasolini began his Trilogy of Life and its forays into a world as yet unspoiled by capitalism.

Oct 9, 2012 — British wartime audiences ate up these rule-breaking costume pictures—entertainments for a populace seeking escapism.

Sep 27, 2011 — Internationally, Victor Sjöström is best known for his performance as Professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). But behind that unforgettable face of old age is a younger man, a leading actor who was also the greatest Swedish...