The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

Jun 23, 2020 — Late in Tokyo Olympiad, Kon Ichikawa’s thrillingly anomalous record of the 1964 Olympic Summer Games, the film documents one of the most taxing contests, the individual modern pentathlon, in a startling montage of still photographs, accompanied by stark sound effects....

Oct 23, 2017 — David Bordwell’s new book, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling, is out, and we’ll be hearing more about it soon. For now, though, New Yorkers will want to know that Bordwell’s coming to town, specifically to the Museum...

Oct 20, 2017 — New York. We opened yesterday’s entry on goings on here and there with a round on MoMA’s series Strange Illusions: Poverty Row Classics Preserved by UCLA, currently running through October 28. We need to again today, because Farran Nehme Smith...

Jan 23, 2017 — In his radical debut feature, Ousmane Sembène reveals the agony of the postcolonial experience through the story of a Senegalese migrant abused by her French employers.

Jun 21, 2016 — Animated in Czechoslovakia amid a Soviet invasion, the French film Fantastic Planet, the third collaboration between René Laloux and Roland Topor, timelessly renders its surreal sci-fi story of captivity and resistance.

Oct 1, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 An artist, critic, and scholar highly respected in his native Iran but too little known in the West, Bahram Beyzaie is a gifted autodidact of traditional and modern theater and performing arts, and...

Dec 10, 2013 — Djibril Diop Mambety’s Senegalese masterwork is remarkable for both its technical audacity and its postcolonialist expressionism.

Dec 4, 2012 — Misunderstood by Hollywood, embraced by critics, this fatalistic fantasy remains Terry Gilliam’s ultimate trip.

Jun 21, 1999 — Laurence Olivier’s Henry V today seems like nothing less than a miracle in answer to the Chorus’s call for “a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.” It’s a dazzling adaptation of a Shakespeare play, made...

Amanda Lee Koe is the author of Ministry of Moral Panic and Delayed Rays of a Star. Born in Singapore, she has spent time in Beijing and Berlin. She now lives in New York.