The Drama

Mar 7, 2012 — A celebration of one of the great cosmopolites of the twentieth century, in one of the cosmopolises he adored.

Jan 25, 2011 —  Sapphire: Inner City Given his strikingly eclectic body of work, it’s not surprising that Basil Dearden has never become a household name—he’s too hard to pin down. Moving effortlessly among comedies, melodramas, and thrillers, over a thirty-five-film, nearly thirty-year career,...

Jul 13, 2010 — At the author’s request, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first. Nineteen thirty-six was a decisive year for imperial Japan, marked by extreme violence at home and abroad. In the very early morning of February 26,...

Dec 1, 2009 — Running a taut ninety-one minutes, this documentary about the Rolling Stones is a masterpiece of restraint and understatement.

Nov 27, 2008 — Despite Samuel Fuller’s career-long penchant for giving controversial subjects a punchy, exploitation-movie spin, his twenty-first feature was the first to suffer outright suppression.

Jul 23, 2007 — It’s hard to think of an artist who better exemplifies the obscuring ebb and flow of film history than Raymond Bernard.

May 26, 2003 — Embracing the world while pretending to sneer at it, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s crime film is rich, deep, and wily.

Aug 20, 2001 — Before Lars von Trier, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson there was Carl Th. Dreyer. The first great film artist to pursue the ineffable in cinema, Dreyer gave depth to what early silent filmmakers innately understood yet took...

Aug 20, 2001 — Carl Dreyer considers the work of art’s soul in this excerpt from Dreyer in Double Reflection.

Jan 29, 2001 — Masahiro Shinoda’s historical drama uses traditional elements of Japanese theater to explore the tension between ethics and eroticism.