Let There Be Light

Mar 14, 2005 — A director is naturally a man like everyone else. Yet his life isn’t normal. For us, seeing is a necessity. For a painter, too, the problem is to see. But while the painter has to discover a static reality, or...

Mar 18, 2003 — Director William Dieterle’s 1941 film adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” is a melodramatic fever dream, a hallucinatory tour de force.

Jul 17, 2000 — Designed to steam viewers’ glasses, Roger Vadim’s directorial debut boldly announced the arrival of Brigitte Bardot.

Jan 10, 2000 — The Night Porter is a provocative and problematic film. Made in 1974 by Italian director Liliana Cavani, it can be seen as an exercise in perversion and exploitation of the Holocaust for the sake of sensationalism. On the other hand,...

Dec 8, 1991 — One of cinema’s most revered thrillers, La Saliare de la Peur or The Wages of Fear is the acknowledged masterpiece of the brilliant French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-77). It is also the film that made popular music hall singer Yves...

Nov 11, 1991 — The following notes are by Mark Kasdan, co-writer and associate producer of Silverado. Albert Camus wrote that a person’s lifework may be “nothing but a long journey to find again, by all the detours of art, the two or three...

Dec 11, 2014 — The opening installment of Terry Gilliam’s “Trilogy of Imagination” reminds us we’d be better off if we paid more attention to the kid’s-eye view of things.

Dec 5, 2005 — If there is a skeleton key to François Truffaut’s oeuvre, it is this film, in which all of his assorted gifts and preoccupations are in play and meshed into a uniquely idiosyncratic whole.

Oct 13, 2026 — Blending elements of psychological thriller, social satire, and psychedelic film, Jerzy Skolimowski’s Cannes-award-winning classic uses its audacious sound design to evoke the terror of English civilization.

Oct 6, 2026 — A dystopian drama that draws on the influences of African mythology and hip-hop, Ngozi Onwurah’s debut feature uses a mix of speculative forms to expose anti-Blackness as a system that underpins the modern world.