Us and Them

Jul 20, 2017 — This year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato wrapped nearly three weeks ago now, and it’s the kind of festival that has attendees reflecting on each edition months and undoubtedly years down the line. Three especially notable pieces have appeared in just the...

Jan 11, 2017 — A love story of startling formal and psychological complexity, Abbas Kiarostami’s 2010 Certified Copy—the late master’s first dramatic feature made outside his native Iran—stars Juliette Binoche and English opera singer William Shimell as an antique dealer and a writer, who...

Aug 14, 2016 — While considered to lie outside the highly policed boundaries of film noir, films like Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind and Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes nevertheless share many of noir’s stylistic and thematic tropes.

Jul 10, 2016 — The author, a filmmaker and film professor who cowrote a book on Abbas Kiarostami, remembers the late Iranian director.

Oct 2, 2012 — Set in 1960s Hong Kong, Wong Kar-wai’s ravishing masterpiece is both a love song to a city and a human romance of epic intimacy.

May 3, 2011 — French auteur cinema has increasingly been exploring themes of sex through scenarios whose explicitness verges on the pornographic. Along with Patrice Chéreau (Intimacy, 2001), Léos Carax (Pola X, 1999), Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi (Baise-moi, 2000), and Gaspar Noé...

May 5, 2009 — Every second of David Fincher’s uncanny drama—every shot and every cut, every gesture and every facial expression, every turn in its narrative and every visual effect—is devoted to the contemplation of time’s passing.

Jan 22, 2007 — A delightfully old-fashioned morality tale, Robert Day’s low-budget space flick is far more than the standard monster fare it was initially sold as.

Aug 22, 2005 — This delicate, fascinating film is self-consciously, almost militantly, naive, and it remains something of an anomaly in Roberto Rossellini’s body of work.

Aug 23, 2004 — This drama about young dreamers is the first definitive plunge into many of Federico Fellini’s dominant thematic and imagistic preoccupations.