Little by Little

Oct 24, 2005 — Kihachi Okamoto’s subversion of the samurai movie possesses the same gritty, stark realism with regard to imagery and body count, yet the tone is decidedly comic.

Oct 24, 2005 — Mirroring changes in awareness, politics, and lifestyle occurring across the globe, the chanbara (or Japanese swordplay film) underwent a significant metamorphosis in the early 1960s, acquiring a decidedly more radical spirit. Seemingly without warning, groundbreaking cinematic styles from beyond the...

Oct 24, 2005 — Kihachi Okamoto’s dynamic, intricately madcap movie is a multitoned send-up of samurai film lore.

Sep 19, 2005 — Jane Campion is a rarity, not simply because she is a world-class female director, but because she has devoted her career to exploring female subjectivity.

Sep 19, 2005 — When I was a teenage cinephile, in the mid-1970s, Masculin féminin was enormously significant to me. It repre­sented France’s nouvelle vague of the sixties, with its youthful, anarchic spirit of freedom and spontaneity. It was in black and white and...

Aug 22, 2005 — This delicate, fascinating film is self-consciously, almost militantly, naive, and it remains something of an anomaly in Roberto Rossellini’s body of work.

Jul 11, 2005 — Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short story balances realism and fantasy.

Jun 27, 2005 — Like his earlier adaptations of Terence Rattigan plays, Anthony Asquith’s late work is bereft of heavy-handed directorial flourishes.

Jun 27, 2005 — Kô Nakahira’s taboo-busting melodrama heralded a reinvention of Japanese cinema.

Jun 13, 2005 — Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. The film’s steady accumulation of incident,...