The Exam

Nov 18, 2016 — For Film Comment, Marc Walkow surveys the career of director Tomu Uchida, currently the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Like many commercial Japanese directors of his era, Uchida has long been underappreciated in the West,...

Jun 29, 2016 — Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria brings together Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart to play out a psychologically complex relationship between two women. Binoche, once again teaming up with Assayas, after starring in his 2008 drama Summer Hours, is Maria...

Mar 9, 2016 — As late, beloved French auteur Jacques Rivette came of age in the early 1950s, a thriving film culture in Paris was developing around the journal Cahiers du cinéma, for which Rivette wrote (and was later editor in chief). Rivette soon...

Dec 30, 2015 — Repertory PicksIn honor of the centennial anniversary of Orson Welles’s birth in 2015, the Northwest Film Center in Portland, Oregon, has undertaken a major celebration of the director’s work that will continue into the New Year. The series offers a...

Feb 17, 2015 — It was never, of course, Yasujiro Ozu’s intention that An Autumn Afternoon (1962) should be the final film of his thirty-­five­-year career as a writer­-director. Indeed, before he died on his sixtieth birthday, in December 1963, he had made notes...

Nov 25, 2014 — More than just observational, Les Blank’s sensual documentaries are personal and participatory celebrations of American culture.

Apr 21, 2014 — A real-life prison uprising inspired this two-fisted tale directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to make many more films about men in extreme situations.

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 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 18, 2012 — One Scene Every time I watch Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, I am stunned that a film could be so full. Here is this thing stuffed with detail, design, behavior, emotion, surprise, and skill. Like Fanny and Alexander and...