Hard to Be a God

Jun 1, 2017 — Earlier this spring, Ryuichi Sakamoto gave an exquisitely intimate concert at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Surrounded by a small audience in the venue’s opulent Veterans Room, the renowned Japanese composer was positioned in the center of the...

Apr 20, 2017 — Programmer Michael Sragow and former Film Society of Lincoln Center program director Richard Peña discuss the holy grail of cinephile TV series and the legendary figures it profiled.

Jun 1, 2016 — With Wrong Move, Wim Wenders made “a movie about the impossibility of moviemaking, a road movie about the uselessness of travel, a literary film about the impossibility of communication.”

Feb 23, 2016 — Without any overt topical references, Mike Nichols’s The Graduate captured the zeitgeist of the 1960s and the dawning countercultural revolution.

Feb 9, 2016 — Jan Troell’s narration of one Swedish couple’s arduous journey to America portrays the migratory quality of marriage—of “finding that you think of this person who is not you, or this place that is not the land of your birth, as...

Aug 17, 2015 — François Truffaut’s love letter to the movies is a lightheartedly self-reflexive symphony of camera movement and musical flourish.

Jul 30, 2015 — It is now thirty years since the release of Stephen Frears’s film, which was both a product of and a response to the social and political landscape of 1980s Britain and depicted the lives of Pakistani immigrants with wit and...

Feb 5, 2013 — Keisuke Kinoshita’s most experimental film is a resplendent, kabuki-inspired, folk-derived drama about mortality.

Jul 24, 2012 — Whit Stillman’s wry comedy about Upper East Siders looked like a perverse bit of daring in 1990; today it seems like an artifact from an earlier century.

Apr 30, 2009 — The following article, based on an interview with Nagisa Oshima conducted by Katsue Tomiyama in April 1983, first appeared, in slightly longer form, in the Japanese magazine Image Forum. Tomiyama is a film producer and cofounder of Image Forum, and...