In This World

Oct 25, 2009 — Costa-Gavras’s 1969 political assassination thriller Z appeared at the end of a decade of burgeoning cultural change and rampant paranoia. In the United States, this Algerian-French coproduction sparked a sensation, not just relaying the European political crisis but perfectly capturing...

Nov 13, 2008 — Mitch Mitchell, the inimitable drummer featured in all of the Jimi Hendrix material in Monterey Pop, died this week at age sixty-one. A one-of-a-kind player, Mitchell was the perfect foil for Hendrix and integral to the sound of the Jimi...

Jul 21, 2008 — Carl Theodor Dreyer’s elliptical and dreamlike vampire film defies definitive shots at interpretation.

Jul 9, 2007 — Hiroshi Teshigahara’s late work is a masterful amalgam of high international modernism and traditional Japanese fine arts.

May 22, 2006 — Luis Buñuel’s merciless satire concerns the smallness of our vision of progress and our narrow attempts to achieve it through rational or moralistic planning.

Aug 20, 2001 — Preston Sturges’s generous-hearted satire achieves a synthesis that is both terribly funny and deeply moving.

Feb 19, 2001 — Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s romance film spins a web of myth and evocative symbolism around its central search for self-discovery.

Nov 22, 1999 — Grand Illusion is the masterpiece that earned Jean Renoir enormous acclaim in the United States, exciting the admiration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and running for 26 weeks in New York after its opening in September 1938. Banned in Italy...

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...

Jan 11, 1999 — It was quite a surprise to learn that David Lean had not read Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations before he embarked on his film version in 1945. The closeness of the adaptation, the understanding of the characters, make one swear it...