The Soft One

May 14, 2013 — Delmer Daves’s classic western is psychologically probing, magnificently shot, and fascinatingly ambiguous.

May 17, 2011 — “There was a strong influence of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal throughout this film,” director Masahiro Shinoda would later remember of his 1964 squid-ink noir Pale Flower, made in the days when his career as a filmmaker and founding figure of...

Dec 7, 2010 — In 1981, it seemed to me that a new era of fantastic cinema was upon us.

Jan 12, 2010 — 8½: a bizarre and puzzling title, but one precisely appropriate for this film, which announces in its first frame that modernism has reached the cinema. If the mark of modernism in art is self-reference, 8½ surely goes beyond any predecessor...

Jul 7, 2008 — Every decade since 1984 the Toronto International Film Festival has conducted a poll of film scholars, critics, and directors to determine the ten best movies in the history of Canadian cinema. This top-ten list has changed somewhat over the years,...

May 15, 2000 — In René Clair’s ebullient early talkie, an unsentimental love of humanity permeates every frame.

Jun 29, 2026 — In the run-up to the country’s 250th birthday, several venues are offering prompts for celebration and reflection.

Jul 1, 2025 — Made nearly two decades into Fritz Lang’s Hollywood career, this brutal noir is designed for maximum velocity and impact, eschewing the director’s accustomed flourishes in favor of a stark literalness.

Sep 17, 2024 — A vision of late-1970s London that foreshadows the political volatility of the Margaret Thatcher era, this gangster saga stars an unforgettably tempestuous Bob Hoskins as a little Englander with big dreams.

May 10, 2024 — Horace Ové’s Pressure opens, Víctor Erice and Pedro Costa exchange ideas, and GQ presents an oral history of Go.