In a Corner

Dec 7, 2010 — In 1981, it seemed to me that a new era of fantastic cinema was upon us.

Mar 15, 2004 — This Japanese classic’s guiding passion is hunger, and its central image—a gaping black hole in the earth—is that of an all-consuming maw.

Jan 20, 2023 — This week: Jerzy Skolimowski, Alice Diop, Alexander Hammid, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Orson Welles.

Mar 5, 2018 — Along with 132 short films and a slew of masterclasses, installations, discussions, and other events, the Berlin International Film Festival presented 253 features this year. I managed to catch twenty-seven of them, and Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not, winner of...

Feb 18, 2018 — Christian Petzold seems to realize that viewers are going to feel as if they’ll need a few moments to get their bearings in the world of Transit. In one swift and brilliant stroke, he denies us the luxury. Georg (Franz...

Jan 25, 2018 — “I don’t scare easily,” begins A. A. Dowd at the A.V. Club. “So it’s a special kind of awful, a rare treat of sorts, when something comes along that actually gets past my defenses, that does more than make me...

Feb 4, 2014 — When François Truffaut was a twenty-three-year-old film critic, in 1955, he read an autobiographical first novel by a seventy-four-year-old writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. “The book overwhelmed me,” he later recalled, “and I wrote: If I ever succeed in making films, I...

Jun 26, 2013 — On the life and work of the famous Czech author, and the pleasures and challenges of translating him.

Sep 8, 1998 — In David Lean’s Summertime, in which Rossano Brazzi seduces Katharine Hepburn—an aging, repressed Ohio “working girl” on vacation in Venice—the Continental lover reached his pinnacle and approached his end. In the next decade, he would be embodied by Marcello Mastroianni,...

Oct 27, 2025 — The self-trained filmmaker examined postindependence Nigerien society in morality tales that showcased his visual ingenuity and sly sense of humor.