The Class

Dec 2, 2013 — With its dazzling array of characters, acerbic take on American entertainment and politics, and innovative approach to sound, this is the ultimate Robert Altman movie.

Feb 25, 2013 — When an ethnographic filmmaker and a sociologist joined forces, they helped change the course of nonfiction cinema.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ability to simultaneously embrace conflicting philosophies was matched by the multifariousness of his professional life, as a controversial filmmaker, writer, painter, actor, and all-around intellectual public figure.

Oct 9, 2012 — British wartime audiences ate up these rule-breaking costume pictures—entertainments for a populace seeking escapism.

Sep 4, 2012 — Umberto D. is perhaps the most astringent film ever made about a poor old man and his dog. Critics today tend to like the astringent parts: the long, deliberately undramatic sequences full of mundane activity (such as a housemaid’s morning...

Jul 24, 2012 — Whit Stillman’s wry comedy about Upper East Siders looked like a perverse bit of daring in 1990; today it seems like an artifact from an earlier century.

Jul 24, 2012 — Trained as a musician, Jean Grémillon became one of French cinema’s most lyrical artists. His most beloved films were made during World War II.

Jul 14, 2012 — Simply stated, Wes Anderson is the most original presence in American film comedy since Preston Sturges. He is as boundlessly confident as  Sturges was in his heyday, and he has a similarly keen ear for gaudy dialogue; a gift for...

May 8, 2012 — To start on a personal note: I wrote a book about La haine that came out in November 2005, just as the Paris suburbs (banlieues) erupted in an unprecedented wave of violence. Every night, as in the Bob Marley song we...

Dec 13, 2011 — Seijun Suzuki’s delirious, absurdist deconstruction of the crime genre is the strangest film the director made at Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest film company.