Hand of Death

Dec 12, 2013 — A beloved filmmaker in India, the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak digs into his region’s traumatic history in this epic melodrama.

Dec 11, 2012 — The climate change expert discusses how Godfrey Reggio’s films presaged widespread concern about global warming and warned about the dangers of consumerism.

Dec 5, 2012 — The following is excerpted from an interview that originally appeared in the February 1, 1981, issue of L’avant-scène: Cinéma. It was conducted by Olivier Eyquem and Jean-Claude Missiaen. Eyquem is a documentalist and former staff member at Positif; he blogs...

Dec 7, 2010 — “Eroticism,” Luis Buñuel told an interviewer, “is a diabolic pleasure that is related to death and rotting flesh.” No filmmaker conveys this idea with more ingenuity and macabre gusto than David Cronenberg, whose movies (hilariously, terrifyingly) illustrate the equation of...

May 25, 2010 — Between 1952 and 2003, depending on how the various serial works are counted, Stan Brakhage made somewhere between 350 and 400 films, about half of them short film poems under ten minutes in length, most of the rest between ten...

Sep 22, 2009 — Something very heavy happened at Monterey last weekend. Those very odd three days began in Friday’s cool gray air as the first of the crowd began to circle through the booths of the fairground. The only word for it then...

Apr 17, 2006 — In the absence of a finished, definitive edit of Orson Welles’s enigmatic project, three writers dive into the unsolvable mystery of the film and the different versions presented in the Criterion edition.

Feb 23, 2004 — With his drama about a Sicilian bandit, Francesco Rosi developed the style and method that would make him, during the sixties and seventies, the greatest political filmmaker of his time.

Jan 5, 2004 — “Sometimes I think of my death,” Kurosawa has written: “I think of ceasing to be . . . and it is from these thoughts that Ikiru came.” The story of a man who knows he is going to die, the...

May 5, 1998 — John Woo’s last film made in Hong Kong before his emigration to the U.S. reflects the city's anxieties and state of crisis throughout the decade.