Witness

Nov 3, 2009 — If ever there was a European art film that could be all things to all people, it’s Wim Wenders’s 1987 masterpiece.

Aug 24, 2009 — Whit Stillman took a risk when he set his third film during (and titled it after) the disco era, whose erstwhile existence, from almost the moment it ended, has seemed to embarrass most Americans more than Watergate. One would think...

Jul 22, 2009 — Made in 1966 (so quickly that it could almost be considered an improvisation), Jean-Luc Godard’s twelfth feature is arguably the most quintessentially “Godardian” of the filmmaker’s early period— but for those of us in the United States, it is also...

Apr 27, 2009 — The idea of making a film about Japan’s most famous sex crime, with a decent budget and in conditions of complete freedom, reawakened Nagisa Oshima’s desire to direct—and the prospect of circumventing Japanese censorship must have made the decision even...

Apr 20, 2009 — The French scientist-educator-filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s groundbreaking work consistently revealed not only a commitment to informed science and effective communication but to the creative expression of ideas.

Mar 16, 2009 — This long-underappreciated giant of Japanese cinema was an innovative visual stylist and a born storyteller who preferred to make films about outsiders.

Jan 6, 2009 — Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning film is not just an epic but also a small film, one in which, somehow or other, the scope of David Lean has been enriched with the vision of Ozu.

Dec 25, 2008 — Robert Rossellini’s efforts to put history into images would yield some forty-two hours of “didactic” movies, mostly for television.

Dec 21, 2008 — In 1962, Roberto Rossellini called a press conference in a bookshop in Rome and announced that the cinema was dead. “There’s a crisis not just in film but culture as a whole,” he explained. Increasingly, Rossellini had understood the great...

Nov 19, 2008 — Albert Lamorisse’s principled balancing of objective fact with childish wish fulfillment results in a new, paradoxical genre—the documentary of dreams.