Best of the Best

Sep 9, 2013 — As outré as it is, the most subversive thing about this classic farce is its take on what’s normal.

Jun 25, 2013 — How Claude Lanzmann made a thoughtful film about the unthinkable and unfilmable.

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.

May 9, 2012 — The paradox of the biopic is that the need to give fictional characters the kind of messy, defining behavior that makes them ring true—makes them, in the vocabulary of development, “relatable”—is usually overlooked when an actual life is condensed into...

This most unpredictable of filmmakers enriched cinema over a nearly forty-year career that took him from the peripheries of the French New Wave to the vanguard of American moviemaking.

May 5, 1998 — John Woo’s last film made in Hong Kong before his emigration to the U.S. reflects the city's anxieties and state of crisis throughout the decade.

Mar 28, 2011 — Topsy-Turvy is both an anomaly among the films of Mike Leigh and, contrary as it may seem, a Rosetta stone. On the one hand, it is Leigh’s only costume picture and only biopic—a far cry from the bittersweet, realistic films...

Sep 16, 2010 — Seven years ago, I was a bright-eyed recent university grad who had just moved to the big city—Toronto—for the first time. I was struggling to find my path as a filmmaker, and at the Toronto International Film Festival that year,...

Jun 23, 2010 — “Wittily written and spare as a coded message . . . The year’s most perilous ride . . . , we wouldn’t exchange it for a season’s commutation ticket on most of the similar vehicles running out of Hollywood.” So...

May 31, 2009 — Apparently, things were as rough on the set of Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life as they were on-screen. In a new piece for the Guardian, written on the occasion of a theatrical rerelease of the film in the United Kingdom,...