The Things of Life

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

Oct 16, 2012 — After breaking out with Maria Full of Grace, filmmaker Joshua Marston visited a strange new land with persistent and deadly traditions.

Oct 4, 2011 — Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work demonstrates an aversion for the present while simultaneously suggesting the impossibility of escaping it, and thus the need to confront it.

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 16, 2008 — Science-fiction drama, western, love story, metaphysical mystery, and satire of modern America, Nicolas Roeg’s beguiling film established him as a mainstream heir to such 1960s experimentalists as Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, and Chris Marker.

Nov 27, 2008 — An enormous welter of insoluble problems is on display in Luis Buñuel’s classic—the ending solves nothing; the story just begins again.

Apr 19, 2004 — “Floating weeds, drifting down the leisurely river of our lives,” has long been a favored metaphor in Japanese prose and poetry. This plant, the ukigusa (duckweed in English), floating aimlessly, carried by stronger currents, is seen as emblematic of our...

Jun 4, 2001 — Mad with images of nature in rebellion, Luis Buñuel’s 1964 film is a droll vision of Eden during the Fall starring a sumptuous Jeanne Moreau.

Jun 1, 2026 — The world’s most desolate film festival expands to nearly a hundred theaters in seventy-three cities.

May 12, 2026 — Sexuality—how one defines it, lives with it, hides it, shuns it, or wields it—is inextricable from matters of socioeconomic class, though rare is the American film that centralizes this intersectional reality. The foundational myth of the American dream puts forth...