The Making of a Man

Oct 23, 2017 — The week starts off with a new trailer (embedded below), poster, and, via Jordan Raup at the Film Stage, an official synopsis for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread:Set in the glamour of 1950s post-war London, renowned dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel...

Sep 17, 2017 — Matteo Garrone’s gritty portrait of the Neapolitan Mafia draws on a lineage of Italian crime films dating back to Francesco Rosi’s trailblazing Salvatore Giuliano.

May 31, 2017 — Long difficult to see, this transgressive silent masterpiece draws on a wide range of aesthetic influences to push against the boundaries of film form.

Mar 28, 2017 — In his first English-language feature, Michelangelo Antonioni examines the elusiveness of the real through the lens of a murder mystery.

Jan 9, 2017 — A feast of whip-smart banter, Howard Hawks’s protofeminist take on newsroom politics is the most grown-up of all remarriage comedies.

Sep 8, 2015 — Brian De Palma magnifies the pleasures and perils of Hitchcock and toys with the viewer’s spectatorship in his sly and scary horror masterpiece.

May 1, 2015 — In his first feature, Jean-Pierre Melville found subtly radical ways to adapt Vercors's underground French novel about quiet resistance against the German occupation.

May 5, 2014 — Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against...

Jan 6, 2014 — Critics commonly describe Throne of Blood (1957) as Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth. While this description is certainly not untrue, the film is much more than a direct cinematic translation of a literary text. Kurosawa’s movie is a brilliant synthesis...

Apr 23, 2013 — Who is Pierre Etaix and where has he been all your life? This is the story of a filmmaker who was vanished, banished, skipped over. It’s as if one of those invisible cubicles mimes are always getting themselves shut in...