The Good Humor Man

Nov 21, 2005 — Akira Kurosawa’s late masterpiece is a tragedy fed by Shakespeare, Noh, and the samurai epic; it shows human brutality, warfare, and suffering as if from the eye of a dispassionate God.

Jan 17, 2005 — Jacques Becker’s genius is to focus resolutely on what comes before or after or falls in between the decisive actions: it’s a crime film where we learn how gangsters brush their teeth.

Dec 11, 1989 — Previous rock-and-roll movies had been little more than showcases for the latest music, aimed at exploiting the youth market, cheaply made and melodramatic—then along came one of the most finely crafted films ever made about rock-and-roll.

Nov 10, 2020 — In the half-light of the opening shot of Girlfriends, a woman asks, “What are you doing?” and another responds, “Go back to sleep.” You could dismiss this as a bit of passing dialogue—or you could see in it a larger...

Jun 28, 2011 — Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro is the funniest book ever written in, and about, the French language. When it came out in 1959, it “made the whole of France laugh,” Jean-Paul Rappeneau, who helped Louis Malle adapt it to...

Sep 3, 2007 — It came from nowhere, it’s always been here—or so Stranger Than Paradise might seem.Jim Jarmusch had completed his first feature, Permanent Vacation, in 1980 and spent the next four years working on his second. Screened a few times as a...

Nov 22, 1999 — Breathtaking, fastmoving, and overflowing with a delightfully self-mocking sense of humor, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is one of the most popular and influential Japanese films ever made. Released in 1954, this rip-snorting action-adventure epic about a sixteenth-century farm community led...

Dec 12, 2022 — Critics, the European Film Academy, and the International Documentary Association spent the weekend listing and awarding.

Dec 18, 2000 — Elegant humor cloaks despair in Luis Buñuel’s masterwork, wherein greedy characters flee their toxic lives and find refuge in the loneliness of dreams.

Feb 1, 1988 — Charles Laughton’s classic has the feel and the force of an American folk fable; yet, it also mixes rural humor with gothic humor, biblical quotation and Freudian symbolism, and everyday realities with a near-mythic confrontation between the forces of good...