The Professor

Sep 4, 2012 — Umberto D. is perhaps the most astringent film ever made about a poor old man and his dog. Critics today tend to like the astringent parts: the long, deliberately undramatic sequences full of mundane activity (such as a housemaid’s morning...

Aug 18, 2008 — This modest-scale psychological drama by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger follows an explosives expert with a drinking problem who harbors a great deal of bitterness.

Dec 30, 2003 — Akira Kurosawa was a man of his time, who participated fully in the artistic and intellectual world of Japan from the 1930s until his death in 1998. Although filmgoers may think of him in terms of the screen images he...

May 31, 2022 — Wayne Wang’s breakthrough feature, a milestone in Asian American cinema, is a humorous and intimate snapshot of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Feb 28, 2012 — In the long history of stage-to-screen translations, there’s never been anything quite like Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), an astonishing hybrid blurring the boundaries between theater and film, rehearsal and performance, actor and character. The production began in...

Racquel Gates is an associate professor of film at Columbia University. She is the author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2018) and is currently writing her second book, Blackness and the Invention of...

Sean O’Sullivan is an associate professor of English at Ohio State University and the author of the Contemporary Film Directors volume on Mike Leigh, from the University of Illinois Press.

Paul Thomas is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory and American Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. A contributing editor of Film Quarterly, he is currently at work on a critical biography of Jean Renoir.

Graham Petrie, professor emeritus at McMaster University in Canada, is the author of books on François Truffaut, Andrei Tarkovsky (with Vida T. Johnson), and Hungarian cinema, as well as Hollywood Destinies: European Directors in America, 1922–1931, which has a section...

Lisa Dombrowski is the author of The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I’ll Kill You! and the editor of Kazan Revisited. She has written for the New York Times, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, Film History, and the Velvet...