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Apr 20, 2009 — The French scientist-educator-filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s groundbreaking work consistently revealed not only a commitment to informed science and effective communication but to the creative expression of ideas.

Apr 9, 2009 — The first time I “met” Max was in May of 1959, when Bergman’s stunning production of Urfaust came to London for just one week in the World Theatre Season. Groupie of all things Swedish that I was, I waited outside...

Mar 10, 2009 — “All movies are political,” the indefatigable Costa-Gavras told Leonard Lopate last week while stopping by his WNYC radio show. As busy and vital as ever, the seventy-six-year-old Greek filmmaker was in town for both the North American premiere of his...

Mar 2, 2009 — If Dillinger is dead, who will take revenge? There were movies once that began, “Custer is dead,” in which you could reckon that a lot of Indians were going to pay the price. This bizarre film by Marco Ferreri (only...

Feb 16, 2009 — Through the story of thunderously, wondrously henpecked men and a determined woman’s romantic zeal, David Lean’s comedy depicts private and social revolution.

Feb 3, 2009 — Luis Buñuel’s surrealist satire is the last film he made in Mexico, the last one in which he used Mexican actors, and most significantly the last one on which he worked with the great Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa.

Jan 25, 2009 — Conventional wisdom once held that any European film worth seeing passed through the New York Film Festival. Still, when I first began reviewing movies for the Village Voice in the late seventies, there were some legendary exceptions: Tarkovsky’s The Mirror,...

Jan 19, 2009 — In 1929, a fifty-one-year-old Congregationalist pastor named Lloyd C. Douglas published his first novel. It was a ramshackle sort of book, at its core an undiluted Christian sermon on the life-transforming power of charitable works. But it was a sermon...

Jan 6, 2009 — Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning film is not just an epic but also a small film, one in which, somehow or other, the scope of David Lean has been enriched with the vision of Ozu.

Dec 29, 2008 — It is a good time to belong to the cult of Fuller. Those of us who consider ourselves members never forget our moment of induction. Some enlisted when his films first hit the screen—lucky enough to catch The Steel Helmet...