The Escape

Oct 24, 2005 — The hero in Masahiro Shinoda’s popular samurai movie is both a genre figure and an ordinary character, both killer and savior, both larger than life and lost in the mists.

Jan 17, 2005 — Along with Touchez pas au grisbi and Le Trou, Casque d’or is now widely recognized as the summit of Jacques Becker’s achievement as a filmmaker.

Feb 23, 2021 — Released in 1985, during the exuberant flowering of films by women brought on by second-wave feminism, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk now feels less of those years than like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, an early challenge to a cultural...

May 11, 2017 — Repertory PicksThis Sunday afternoon, and again on Tuesday evening, Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty’s one-of-a-kind first feature, 1973’s Touki bouki, will screen at Baltimore’s long-shuttered Parkway Theatre, newly reopening for year-round programming after an $18.5 million renewal spearheaded by the...

Jan 21, 2014 — Bigger is better in Stanley Kramer’s crazily crammed slapstick epic, a timeless showcase for comedy genius.

Apr 14, 2011 — Performances Roberto Rossellini is not often discussed as a director of actors, and Vittorio De Sica is remembered less as a performer than as a filmmaker. Il generale della Rovere, Rossellini’s searing World War II morality drama from 1959 featuring...

Mar 17, 2009 — Remember Uncle Monty’s “horrible shack,” that forbidding slab of stone and mortar Marwood and Withnail escape to in the cult classic Withnail and I? Well, the real name of that Lake District cottage is Crow Crag, and after years of...

Jul 16, 2008 — The locations for many of Ingmar Bergman’s most dramatically spare films have existed for so long in moviegoers’ minds as stark black-and-white dream states that to walk through them in living, vibrant color is truly transformative. Imagine the harsh, pebbled...

Sep 27, 1999 — While researching a book on the making of and the feud over the American release of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, I read nearly every review published in the U.S., and saw very few that failed to describe the story as “futuristic”...

Jul 15, 2025 — Much of the program upends assumptions about the postwar years as a period of relative calm and conformity.