To Be and to Have

Apr 25, 2005 — In Andrzej Wajda’s masterful antiwar film, we see scarcely a single combat death, yet the dark radiance of doom haloes one and all.

Apr 25, 2005 — Pietro Germi offers locomotive relief in this comedy about the horrors of inertia.

May 17, 2004 — Banned by the Third Reich before it was even released, Fritz Lang’s denunciation of Nazi Germany is a compellingly contemporary image of terrorism in an age of universal conspiracy and advanced technology.

Sep 29, 2003 — Roman Polanski’s maiden feature would define his maverick status once and for all.

Aug 18, 2003 — The two versions of Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist romance offer case studies in Hollywood and European sensibilities as they existed in the early 1950s.

Jan 6, 2003 — Ernst Lubitsch set the screwball comedy standard, treating hard-on material with dignified aplomb and a combination of suaveness, hilarity, and sexiness.

Jan 6, 2003 — With its casually comfortable exoticism, abstruse locale, and beautifully sympathetic anti-hero, Julien Duvivier’s film established a narrative paradigm that persists today.

Jul 29, 2002 — Viewing Kon Ichikawa’s film of the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo, it is apparent that even then his main idea (despite the more than 150 cameras available to him) was to present a fragmented picture of the Games, rather than...

Apr 15, 2002 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s first-class crime picture may be the most elegantly rigorous movie ever made about a cockeyed heist.

Feb 14, 2002 — Robert Bresson’s second feature is fixed in history as one of the movies that heralded an austere, modernistic way of seeing and feeling.