The Work

Nov 22, 1999 — Breathtaking, fastmoving, and overflowing with a delightfully self-mocking sense of humor, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is one of the most popular and influential Japanese films ever made. Released in 1954, this rip-snorting action-adventure epic about a sixteenth-century farm community led...

Nov 22, 1999 — Grand Illusion is the masterpiece that earned Jean Renoir enormous acclaim in the United States, exciting the admiration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and running for 26 weeks in New York after its opening in September 1938. Banned in Italy...

Jun 21, 1999 — Laurence Olivier’s Henry V today seems like nothing less than a miracle in answer to the Chorus’s call for “a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.” It’s a dazzling adaptation of a Shakespeare play, made...

Jul 4, 1994 — Mike Leigh was born in the north of England in 1943. He was trained in the theater at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and in film at the London Film School. When he arrived in London in the early...

Dec 3, 1990 — Over the years I have had a recurrent nightmare in which I am summoned to a large, unfamiliar building in a middle-European satellite country (Bulgaria, perhaps) to tell the idea of Annie Hall to the Bulgarian Minister of Green Lights,...

Apr 23, 1990 — Paying little attention to civilized rules of cinema, and with a bit more than one million dollars, Steven Soderbergh expresses all his hidden anxieties in this indie classic.

Aug 10, 2012 — Never has a Hollywood filmmaker been less fazed by the prospect of tackling adaptations of major books than the journeyman director John Huston. By the time he dug his nails into Malcolm Lowry’s 1947 Under the Volcano (ranked the eleventh...

Nov 12, 2021 — A new podcast delves into the life and work of Chantal Akerman, and Reverse Shot opens a new symposium.

Mar 4, 2020 — A series in New York celebrates the under-recognized work of Alma Reville and Joan Harrison.

Jul 30, 2018 — Retrospectives of the French master’s work are playing in New York and Berkeley, with Washington to follow in September.