A Way Out

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.

Jan 21, 2008 — In September 1997, I saw Agnès Varda introduce a brand-new 35 mm print of her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (made in 1954), to an admiring audience at Yale University. More astonishing than the luminous black-and-white images was Varda’s...

Nov 19, 2007 — Ingmar Bergman made some outstanding films before Sawdust and Tinsel (1953). But that film, released in America under the meretricious title The Naked Night—and known in Sweden as The Clown’s Evening—was the first that no other director could have made....

Sep 3, 2007 — Iwas a cab driver once myself (in Los Angeles, in the mid-1970s), and I’ve been sensitive ever since to how the profession is portrayed on the screen. As it happened, I was driving a cab when Taxi Driver came out,...

Jan 29, 2001 — In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s drama, the characters abandon their twin faiths, in God and the British Empire, and turn themselves over to more ancient and dangerous powers.

Jun 16, 2009 — In Tempo di viaggio (1983), the doodle Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra made for Italian TV as they prepped Nostalghia, the great struggling Russian answers a question about genre films by saying that his Solaris (1972) is “not so good,”...

Apr 2, 2018 — The director of Love After Love examines the emotional subtlety of Maurice Pialat’s camera work in a pivotal scene in the 1983 masterpiece À nos amours.

Sep 27, 2017 — Filmmaker Allison Anders recalls a story about her time working with the late Harry Dean Stanton on the set of Paris, Texas.

Jul 19, 2017 — A showcase for the bighearted sensibility of the late Jonathan Demme, the tonally intricate comic thriller Something Wild plays in Athens, Georgia, today through Sunday.

Sep 29, 2015 — Merchant Ivory Productions’ sun-kissed romantic comedy is an effervescent tale of class and manners among the Edwardian English.