Faces of Death

Mar 8, 2022 — A parable of wayward women in a world without mothers, Márta Mészáros’s 1975 feature catapulted the Hungarian auteur to international prominence.

Aug 3, 2020 — The first European box-office success of the movement dubbed the New German Cinema, Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s 1975 The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum took on a hot-button issue: the paranoia provoked by homegrown terrorism and the opportunity that...

Jul 3, 2020 — As The War of the Worlds is essentially a cautionary tale, each generation gets its own adaptation of H. G. Wells’s classic account of extraterrestrial invasion—one of the several seminal science-fiction novels, also including The Time Machine (1895) and The...

May 9, 2018 — “One of the best Welles documentaries” makes the case for the director as a brilliant graphic artist.

Dec 20, 2017 — In her latest column, critic Imogen Sara Smith explains how cinematographer Henri Decaë brought a risk-taking spirit and seductive allure to some of the most iconic French crime films.

Jun 27, 2017 — Alfred Hitchcock brings a spirit of cinematic ingenuity to a thin narrative, resulting in a flawed but fascinating film that contains one of the most virtuosic sequences in his filmography.

Dec 13, 2016 — John Huston’s meticulously calibrated crime film combines nail-biting suspense with a mood of Chekhovian regret.

Feb 16, 2016 — In Death by Hanging, Nagisa Oshima spins a complex aesthetic web around his documentary-like structure, packing detail, history, politics, and emotion into his surrealist inquiry into capital punishment.

Apr 1, 2015 — Ingmar Bergman plumbs unfathomable depths in his cinematically sensual tale of four women facing the inevitable in mind and body.

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.