This Is Not a Film

Mar 26, 2007 — Across five films, the Swedish director defined his guiding themes and cinematic style.

Mar 16, 2007 — The first of his films to be shown outside Japan, Ichikawa Kon’s twenty-seventh feature dramatically raised the director’s profile.

Feb 21, 2006 — Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) is an Ealing comedy in name only. True, it’s undeniably a comedy and was made by (though largely not at) Ealing. But in virtually every other respect, it deviates startlingly from the commonly accepted stereotype....

Jun 13, 2005 — Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. The film’s steady accumulation of incident,...

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.

Jun 18, 2001 — Pent-up, unfulfilled sexuality spills onto the screen in Douglas Sirk’s sumptuous melodrama.

Sep 18, 2000 — Reviewing Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film of Hamlet, James Agee—then a critic at Time—wrote: “The man who brings Hamlet, his friends, and his antagonists to life has tackled one of the most fascinating and most thankless tasks in show business. ....

Nov 22, 1999 — Grand Illusion is the masterpiece that earned Jean Renoir enormous acclaim in the United States, exciting the admiration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and running for 26 weeks in New York after its opening in September 1938. Banned in Italy...

Nov 19, 1990 — By facing death, Akira Kurosawa fashions an affirmation of life, characteristically clear-headed in its exploration of man’s fate.

Nov 12, 1990 — For a twenty-seven-year-old director with a smattering of television experience and only one prior feature, Steven Spielberg demonstrated an awesome mastery of the film medium when his first big production hit the screen in 1975. An instant and certifiable phenomenon,...