The New Girlfriend

Dec 13, 2011 — Just what is it that makes Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter (1966) so different, so appealing? The cherubic hero in the neat powder blue suit, who looks like he was torn out of a yakuza pop-up book? That hauntingly cornball theme...

May 20, 2009 — The title alone screams incongruity. Shohei Imamura’s 1961 black-and-white caper movie Pigs and Battleships bursts with the confusion and exuberance of a cross-cultural encounter. In its lively portrayal of enthusiastic Japanese locals welcoming the U.S. Navy on R&R to the...

Mar 27, 2006 — Louis Malle’s World War II–era drama follows a young collaborationist in rural France and asks how people with no interest in politics become active participants in brutal torture.

Dec 4, 2006 — I had said that I was going to write about growing up with a projector in my attic, and Peter’s writing about home last week brought back some memories. Movies were cool. In the late sixties, my father would bring...

Apr 17, 2013 — Four of the great Japanese director’s lesser-known, early films show the coming into being of a political artist.

Dec 8, 2023 — Roy Waller (Nicolas Cage), the jittery protagonist of Ridley Scott’s 2003 crime comedy Matchstick Men, doesn’t like to think of himself as a common crook. “I’m a con artist,” he insists, and—in a frenzy of self-justification—further explains: “They give me...

Aug 16, 2021 — Here’s what critics have been saying about the winners of the top awards.

Oct 29, 2014 — George Sluizer’s singularly unsettling work of psychological terror is a model of lucid craftsmanship.

Dec 1, 2009 — Mick Jagger’s former assistant remembers the joy and chaos of touring with the Stones.

Jul 22, 2009 — Made in 1966 (so quickly that it could almost be considered an improvisation), Jean-Luc Godard’s twelfth feature is arguably the most quintessentially “Godardian” of the filmmaker’s early period— but for those of us in the United States, it is also...