Death of a Bureaucrat

Oct 24, 2005 — Hideo Gosha’s swordplay drama captures rebellion against the Japanese feudal system, pitting its twin protagonists against each other but also, together, against the very notion of authority itself.

Feb 18, 2026 — Among this month’s highlights are a celebration of VHS and how it revolutionized film culture, a spotlight on the Romanian New Wave, and a retrospective of pioneering queer filmmaker Monika Treut.

Sep 27, 2019 — Some of the top titles premiering in Berlin, Locarno, and Venice this year are featured in the New York Film Festival’s Main Slate.

Sep 10, 2017 — “Fear rises like gas from a corpse in Armando Iannucci’s brilliant horror-satire The Death of Stalin,” begins the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “It’s a sulphurous black comedy about the backstairs Kremlin intrigue that followed the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953,...

Apr 19, 2021 — What lies beyond the grave? Human cultures across space and time have imagined many kinds of afterlives, from the attenuated shades of Hades to the lush paradise of the Islamic Jannah to the merger with the infinite anticipated by mystics....

Jun 14, 2016 — Alexander Hall’s 1941 film showcased Robert Montgomery’s star power and, with its premise of a death revoked, provided much-needed comic relief to war-worried audiences.

Jan 6, 2023 — We’re catching up with a conversation with Tom Gunning, an essay on the nuclear threat, and appreciations of Jean-Louis Trintignant and Norma Shearer.

Feb 5, 2019 — Shame (1968) is one of the great neglected films from Ingmar Bergman’s midcareer creative explosion. It builds on and surpasses the two Bergman films that immediately preceded it: the avant-garde milestone Persona (1966) and the surreal shocker Hour of the...

Aug 17, 2021 — Songbook It will always figure for me as an interval of eerily suspended time: not only a formative moviegoing experience but a jolt of awareness when the line between screen and life dissolved. In a dimly lit Tokyo cabaret the...

Jun 9, 2026 — Over the course of four decades, the great Mauritanian French filmmaker Med Hondo created a stylistically diverse, politically trenchant body of work that frequently tapped into his own Pan-African roots and explored the existential and material stresses of Black people...