The Way

May 24, 2010 — Alain Resnais’s 1961 French New Wave masterpiece Last Year at Marienbad has long been one of cinema’s most magnificently inscrutable films, but at least one of its mysteries has now been solved. The actress Françoise Spira, a cast member, documented...

May 11, 2010 — The great Japanese actor Kei Sato passed away last week; he was eighty-one years old. You may not recognize Sato’s name, but if you’ve seen a Japanese film in the past fifty years, there’s a reasonably good chance you’ve fallen,...

Mar 17, 2010 — Congratulations to yesterday’s winner, Caroline! Caroline’s pick for a work of Western literature she wishes Kurosawa had adapted was Oedipus Rex: I would love to have seen Kurosawa do Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. Honestly, I think that he is the only...

Oct 19, 2009 — Though known primarily for her wildly varied, continent-hopping features (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, Vanity Fair, The Namesake), Indian director Mira Nair has for the past three decades also been forging a parallel career of short filmmaking. Both fiction (Migration, How...

Jul 14, 2009 — Tough title to live up to. The lofty three-word phrase Al Reinert chose for his 1989 documentary on the Apollo space program comes from the plaque the first men on the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, left there in...

Apr 21, 2009 — Mark your calendars: Janus Films and the Criterion Collection’s theatrical release Revanche opens next Friday, May 1, in New York, Seattle, and Boston, and the early press is awesome. Götz Spielmann got a rave for his tense, thrilling drama from...

Mar 14, 2009 — Many of us have fond memories of sunny weekend jaunts to the country. But how many can boast spending those outings with Francis Ford Coppola and Akira Kurosawa? Only Wim Wenders, whose hiccup-fraught trip to Coppola’s Napa Valley home in...

Nov 27, 2008 — A genuine cause célèbre, adapted from Romain Gary’s 1970 nonfiction novel, Samuel Fuller’s late work is an unusually blunt and suggestively metaphoric account of American racism.

Nov 16, 2008 — Chungking Express (1994) was the Masculin féminin of the 1990s, a pop-art movie about cool twentysomethings looking for love in the city that has replaced Paris as the center of the world-cinema imagination. What Jean-Luc Godard did for “the children...

Jul 16, 2008 — The locations for many of Ingmar Bergman’s most dramatically spare films have existed for so long in moviegoers’ minds as stark black-and-white dream states that to walk through them in living, vibrant color is truly transformative. Imagine the harsh, pebbled...