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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...

Jan 29, 2014 — Thanks to Terence Davies’s distinctive filmmaking style, The Long Day Closes doesn’t quite feel like any other motion picture. This intensely moving, ethereal reverie on a brief happy period of the director’s often sad childhood in Liverpool during the fifties...

Jan 28, 2014 — Terence Davies beckons the viewer into a private world of moods and sensations with this exquisite childhood reverie.

Jan 24, 2014 — Aki Kaurismäki first read Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème in 1976. The highly influential 1851 book—an episodic novel about a group of starving artists that also inspired Puccini’s 1896 opera La bohème—captured the Finnish filmmaker’s imagination and,...

Jan 20, 2014 — Aki Kaurismäki pays wry tribute to the starving artist in his sad and funny update of Henri Murger’s classic book.

Jan 13, 2014 — With economy and panache, Michael Mann established his existential crime drama style with this breakthrough first feature.

Jan 7, 2014 — Satyajit Ray was ailing when he made them, but these three works from the great filmmaker’s final years show an artist at the height of his powers.

Jan 6, 2014 — Critics commonly describe Throne of Blood (1957) as Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth. While this description is certainly not untrue, the film is much more than a direct cinematic translation of a literary text. Kurosawa’s movie is a brilliant synthesis...

Dec 30, 2013 — Charlie Chaplin’s comedy has a secret ingredient that has bound us to him forever.

Dec 22, 2013 — The author reflects on his interactions with the great filmmaker.