The Set-Up

Aug 29, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled...

Aug 18, 2009 — In the late 1970s, during the long years of waiting for international and domestic funding to come together to produce Kagemusha, Akira Kurosawa returned to the pastime of his youth—he painted. Working fast and furiously, each day turning out scores...

Aug 20, 2018 — The star and producer of The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez made a trailblazing intervention in an iconically American genre, creating an indelible portrait of a Latino American hero.

May 31, 2016 — With Alice in the Cites, Wim Wenders created one of the most nuanced and complex portraits of an empowered young girl ever seen on-screen.

Feb 11, 2025 — Jean-Luc Godard’s first English-language narrative feature is a postapocalyptic fantasy that shifts from antic humor to tragic grandeur while challenging deep-rooted assumptions about what a Shakespearean movie should be.

Sep 14, 2016 — Asian-cinema expert Tony Rayns unpacks the significance of Zatoichi’s name and the strict social hierarchy that the character so gleefully upends.

May 16, 1988 — Prior to the success of Scaramouche in 1952, many in Hollywood felt that the big-budget “swashbuckler” film was no longer a safe investment. While such motion pictures as MGM’s version of The Three Musketeers (directed by George Sidney, 1948) and...

Feb 22, 2018 — Bengali cinema icon Uttam Kumar stars as a matinee idol on the brink of failure in this deeply introspective meditation on art and fame.

May 22, 2017 — “At the risk of accidentally donating three words to the poster, How to Talk to Girls at Parties looks like it was phenomenally good fun to make,” grants the Telegraph’s Tim Robey. “An alien-sex-comedy-punk-musical-doodle set in 1977 Croydon, it packs...

Oct 28, 2013 — A husband and wife in 1960s Milan are isolated from each other and displaced in the modern world in Michelangelo Antonioni’s tale of love and space.