The Return

Jan 8, 2019 — A few lingering observations on the films of 2018 from Slate’s Movie Club, the New York Times, and more.

Mar 5, 2018 — On the anniversary of his birth, we look back on the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the most radical figures of Italian cinema.

Feb 11, 2017 — Ermanno Olmi captures the dignity of work in this painterly vision of late nineteenth-century rural Italy.

Sep 13, 2016 — Kenji Mizoguchi achieved the sublime with this structurally complex portrait of artistic ambition and female subjugation.

Mar 12, 2007 — Kon Ichikawa’s incendiary and extraordinarily brutal war film renders the emotional carnage that festers long after the battle’s end.

Jan 22, 2007 — Spencer Gordon Bennet’s eclectic science fiction–adventure movie bundles a serious patriotic message within its retelling of the Odysseus myth.

Aug 4, 2003 — Shohei Imamura’s lurid black comedy showcases the director’s passion for everything that’s kinky, lowlife, or irrational in Japanese culture.

Feb 11, 2002 — The last, best, and funniest movie Milos Forman would make in his native Czechoslovakia is a deceptively simple miniature.

Nov 14, 1995 — Tamura (Eiji Funakoshi), the hero of Kon Ichikawa’s drama, may be the loneliest man in the history of the movies—lonelier than the spiritual pilgrims of Bergman, Bresson, and Dreyer.

Nov 14, 2025 — This week: Buñuel revivals, the Rock Hudson centenary, and Mishima’s Japanese premiere.