If Only

Mar 26, 2007 — Across five films, the Swedish director defined his guiding themes and cinematic style.

Dec 5, 2005 — René Clément’s masterpiece is dedicated to the radical Freudian proposal that living matter seeks the comfort of oblivion.

Aug 2, 2004 — The three film’s in Renoir’s trilogy are comic period fantasies in dazzling color, offering a kind of continuous, bustling choreography in which shifting power relations between upper and lower classes and between spectators and performers literally turn the world into...

May 26, 2003 — Transcription of a speech given by long-time Derek Jarman collaborator and friend, actress Tilda Swinton

Apr 20, 2009 — The French scientist-educator-filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s groundbreaking work consistently revealed not only a commitment to informed science and effective communication but to the creative expression of ideas.

Feb 24, 2026 — For this existential noir, Joel and Ethan Coen drew inspiration from crime-fiction master James M. Cain’s lean, hard-boiled style and interest in the quotidian world of work.

Feb 18, 2025 — In her mainstream breakthrough, director Joan Micklin Silver envisions New York City through the eyes of a complicated, searching woman trying to figure out her place in the world.

Jan 21, 2025 — In his first Hollywood film, British director Stephen Frears dives into the nihilistic world of Jim Thompson’s fiction, delivering an adaptation profoundly attuned to the novelist’s sense of ineluctable suffering.

Nov 21, 2023 — The decades have flown by, but Mean Streets (1973) has not become the least bit dated, even though we know how the careers of all the principals have evolved in the years since, not to mention that the world just...