Forever First Love

Jun 22, 2009 — So much critical ink has been shed over Last Year at Marienbad that one might wonder if the flood of commentary, once receded, would take the film along with it. Alain Resnais’ second feature has been lavishly praised and royally...

May 5, 2009 — Every second of David Fincher’s uncanny drama—every shot and every cut, every gesture and every facial expression, every turn in its narrative and every visual effect—is devoted to the contemplation of time’s passing.

Sep 17, 2007 — Today we are used to seeing dance artistically presented on television and in movies—these films about Martha Graham helped to make that happen.

Jul 9, 2007 — Hiroshi Teshigahara’s late work is a masterful amalgam of high international modernism and traditional Japanese fine arts.

Apr 16, 2007 — Jules Dassin’s noir is arguably the meatiest and most resonant prison film ever made in Hollywood, drawing explicit parallels to the Nazi encampment experience.

Aug 14, 2006 — It’s both hard and not so hard to believe that Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales were conceived—indeed, written initially—as a novel. On the one hand, he’s the grand master of dialogue as an instrument of narrative. His characters muse, reflect, analyze,...

Jan 5, 2006 — A gray flannel ghost story in which the living haunt the dead, the least appreciated of Akira Kurosawa’s midperiod collaborations with Toshiro Mifune throws open the windows of Japanese corporate corruption.

Dec 5, 2005 — If there is a skeleton key to François Truffaut’s oeuvre, it is this film, in which all of his assorted gifts and preoccupations are in play and meshed into a uniquely idiosyncratic whole.

Dec 5, 2005 — René Clément’s masterpiece is dedicated to the radical Freudian proposal that living matter seeks the comfort of oblivion.

Mar 15, 2004 — This Japanese classic’s guiding passion is hunger, and its central image—a gaping black hole in the earth—is that of an all-consuming maw.