A Real Pain

Jul 31, 2017 — What is the defining characteristic of the femme fatale? Critic Imogen Sara Smith explores the range of this film noir archetype through a handful of classic performances.

Mar 22, 2017 — A tragedian at heart, Shirley Stoler found her Medea in the role of a glowering bandit on the run in Leonard Kastle’s seedy true-crime drama.

Jun 7, 2016 — Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1955 feature about a group of Turinese women plays on the themes of the novel it was adapted from, while showcasing the developing style of the soon-to-be legendary director.

Nov 17, 2015 — Satyajit Ray began his filmmaking career by offering a vision of the young Apu, the character he would go on to follow throughout the three films of his stunning breakthrough epic.

Jul 17, 2015 — As visually and sociopolitically expansive as it is intimate in its details of a boy’s coming of age, Jan Troell’s film is one of the great cinematic debuts.

Jul 15, 2014 — Among the brainiest of all horror movies, David Cronenberg’s film goes beyond shock to investigate a disturbing world of psychic mutation.

Nov 12, 2013 — Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig create a luminous, romantic portrait of a young woman looking for fulfillment in New York City.

Mar 18, 2013 — Using a 1958 murder spree as a narrative springboard, Terrence Malick fashioned a fractured fairy tale about American innocence lost.

Jul 31, 2012 — Aki Kaurismäki’s latest working-class fable is his warmest, and his most political.

Apr 25, 2012 — Pearls of the Deep: Alumni AssociationIn the mid-1960s, there was a brief window during which a remarkable cinema of ideas and visual experimentation flourished in Communist Czechoslovakia. This fecund period lasted approximately five years, from 1963 to 1968, when it...