The First World War

May 13, 2015 — Cannes is complicated. To the first-time visitor, it seems a blur of parties, dinners, and screenings, and wherever you are, you are constantly troubled by the thought that the really hot screening or the really hip party is happening elsewhere.

Apr 20, 2015 — "Afilm about India without elephants and tiger hunts”—this was how Jean Renoir described his objective in making The River. Guided by Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel, he rejected the India of exotic action and spectacle to make a meditative, almost mystical...

Dec 12, 2013 — A beloved filmmaker in India, the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak digs into his region’s traumatic history in this epic melodrama.

Nov 6, 2012 — When Akira Kurosawa made Rashomon (1950), he was a forty-year-old director working near the beginning of a career that would last fifty years, produce some of the greatest films ever made, and exert a tremendous and lasting influence on filmmaking...

Oct 9, 2012 — British wartime audiences ate up these rule-breaking costume pictures—entertainments for a populace seeking escapism.

Jun 11, 2012 — Charlie Chaplin’s transcendent, visionary comedy is made up of one iconic moment after another.

Jun 10, 2011 — Bringing Junichiro Tanizaki’s sprawling, elegiac histor­ical novel The Makioka Sisters (1948) to the screen would seem an undertaking tailor-made for Kon Ichikawa. The renowned writer’s work was familiar territory for the veteran director, who had adapted the quirky Tanizaki novella...

Feb 22, 2011 — It wasn’t intended. No one could have predicted it. But Sweet Smell of Success turned out to be a terminus where several movie genres and subgenres converged and curdled, producing a uniquely delicious perfume of everlasting cynicism. Inhale deeply. And...

Oct 19, 2010 — With Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa set out to debunk some of the more inflated myths that had attached themselves to the samurai.

Feb 16, 2009 — Through the story of thunderously, wondrously henpecked men and a determined woman’s romantic zeal, David Lean’s comedy depicts private and social revolution.