Smile

Sep 13, 2004 — The following piece by Sony Pictures Classics cofounder and copresident Michael Barker, who picked up Slacker for Orion Classics in 1991, originally appeared in the program for the 2001 Austin Film Society event Slacker: A Ten-Year Reunion. What I’ve found...

Jan 5, 2004 — Jacques Tati’s second tale about the whimsical wanderer Monsieur Hulot, this classic comedy presents a world in which characters are defined solely by their actions.

Jan 21, 2002 — A fresco conceived on a majestic scale, Marcel Carné’s masterpiece sweeps its audience back to the 1820s, painting the detail of a world obsessed with both theater and crime.

Aug 20, 2001 — Carl Dreyer considers the work of art’s soul in this excerpt from Dreyer in Double Reflection.

May 7, 2001 — test

Apr 23, 2001 — In 1955, Jules Dassin, an American director in exile in Paris, made this flat-out perfect piece of cinema. The film came as a redemption for Dassin: a one-time promising young director cranking out B-movies under an MGM contract ("They were...

Aug 28, 2000 — Alberto Lattuada’s gifts for dramatic narrative were joined for the first and last time with Federico Fellini’s flair for cartoonish satire and lyrical sentiment.

Jan 15, 1996 — If Akira Kurosawa is the John Ford of Japanese samurai dramas, then director Kihachi Okamoto—a specialist in action films, with a particulat accent on violence and raw characterizations—is the samurai film’s Sam Fuller.

Sep 23, 1993 — Two men, one woman and a boy. French director Bertrand Blier fashions out of this bizarre love quadrangle a film of seamless beauty, high farce and, finally, haunting majesty. To experience Get Out Your Handkerchiefs is to watch a master...

May 25, 1992 — If Max Ophuls hadn’t cooled his heels in Hollywood to flee the Nazis, his name might have conjured only the most unintelligible of foreign cinema—vague and inaccessible to the average American filmgoer. But in 1948 Ophuls was given an opportunity...