Off-Balance

Nov 8, 1999 — In The Third Man—probably the greatest British thriller of the postwar era—director Carol Reed and screenwriter Graham Greene set a fable of moral corruption in a world of near-Byzantine visual complexity: the streets and ruins of occupied Vienna. It is...

Apr 19, 1994 — Rivaled only by Fritz Lang and G. W. Pabst as Germany’s greatest director of the silent age, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was a tireless formal innovator exhilaratingly difficult to pin down. If his 1922 horror epic Nosferatu represented an apex of...

Mar 28, 2022 — At once euphoric and elegiac, Martin Scorsese’s concert documentary captures the members of the Band on the brink of spiritual and physical collapse as they mount their transcendent final send-off.

Oct 16, 2013 — Georges Franju deftly balances fantasy and realism, clinical detachment and operatic emotion, beauty and pain, all presided over by Edith Scob’s haunting, haunted eyes.

Apr 28, 2026 — As the 1950s began, Kinuyo Tanaka found herself at a turning point. She had been acting in films since she was fourteen, becoming one of Japan’s most beloved, admired, and prolific women stars. Now in her early forties, she saw...

Apr 14, 2026 — New films from Radu Jude, Clio Barnard, Lisandro Alonso, and Alain Cavalier are headed to Cannes.

Dec 9, 2025 — In her Cannes-award-winning narrative feature debut, Mira Nair sees the lives of Indian street children with an unconditionally generous gaze, taking in their world in all its contradictions and complexity.

Aug 13, 2025 — Toronto will premiere Claire Denis’s new film and New York will present Rebecca Miller’s five-part Mr. Scorsese in its entirety.

Jan 15, 2025 — Edward Berger’s improbably entertaining follow-up to All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) scores twelve.

Dec 16, 2024 — News, reviews, and recommendations featuring Paul Schrader, Cher, Terrence Malick, and more.