The Silent One

Jun 20, 2017 — “Bertrand Tavernier joins a growing list of filmmakers who've made what amounts to an epic video essay with My Journey Through French Cinema, a three-hour-plus leap into notable French filmmaking from roughly 1930 to 1980,” writes Clayton Dillard at Slant....

Jan 11, 2017 — A revelatory restoration of Lewis Milestone’s underappreciated newsroom comedy accentuates the film’s punchy rhythms and breakneck banter.

Jan 9, 2017 — A feast of whip-smart banter, Howard Hawks’s protofeminist take on newsroom politics is the most grown-up of all remarriage comedies.

Oct 5, 2016 — Rock critic Robert Christgau examines the evocative use of three early Leonard Cohen songs in Robert Altman’s brilliant revisionist western.

Sep 27, 2016 — This monumental meditation on the Ten Commandments captures the spiritual undercurrents of life in late-Communist Poland.

Jun 15, 2016 — Although afflicted by on-set drama and offscreen tragedy, Jean Renoir’s La Chienne shows the director’s early mastery of sound cinema and features the trademarks that would come to define his style.

May 17, 2016 — Juxtaposing a vision of a stark, primitive existence on a remote Japanese island with that country’s vast twentieth-century modernization, Kaneto Shindo reveals Japan’s postwar paradoxes and makes a case for its essential, immutable character.

Jun 4, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder stocked the cast of The Merchant of Four Seasons with friends and colleagues from his experimental theater days.

May 1, 2015 — In his first feature, Jean-Pierre Melville found subtly radical ways to adapt Vercors's underground French novel about quiet resistance against the German occupation.

Aug 4, 2014 — Rebellious children of the sixties become conflicted consumers of the eighties in Lawrence Kasdan’s elegiac comedy-drama.