The Sword of Doom

Sep 24, 2025 — Propelled by outstanding performances from Emmanuelle Devos and Vincent Cassel, Jacques Audiard’s third feature is the rare French crime film built around a complex female character who takes initiative in a male-dominated world.

Sep 14, 2016 — Asian-cinema expert Tony Rayns unpacks the significance of Zatoichi’s name and the strict social hierarchy that the character so gleefully upends.

Jul 21, 1998 — Despite its title, Samurai II, Duel at Ichijoji Temple, is not really an action film. It has more than its share of action and violence, to be sure—the duel between Musashi Miyamoto (Toshiro Mifune) and the chain-and-sickle master that opens...

Jul 17, 1995 — Kurosawa made the acquaintance of Desu Uzala thirty years earlier, when he read Vladimir Arseniev’s account of charting the Russian-Manchurian border in the earlier part of this century. There, the Russian soldier and explorer had met Dersu, the Siberian hunter,...

Sep 20, 2016 — Cloaked in chiaroscuro and innuendo, this stylistically innovative creature feature leaves its greatest horrors to the imagination.

Dec 1, 2015 — Critic Todd McCarthy takes an inside look at Michael Ritchie's outdoor drama, which he calls “spare, cut to the bone, as fine as dry powder. Had Hemingway ever written about competitive skiing, this would have been the right style with...

Oct 24, 2005 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s great film flirts with macho extremism and slips over into dream and poetry just as it has us most alarmed.