To Tea

Jul 13, 2010 — At the author’s request, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first. Nineteen thirty-six was a decisive year for imperial Japan, marked by extreme violence at home and abroad. In the very early morning of February 26,...

May 18, 2010 — Nicolas Roeg’s first solo outing as a director is an astonishing visual poem, by turns violent, innocent, and elegiac.

Aug 13, 2007 — Cría cuervos . . . , Carlos Saura's political and psychological masterpiece, was shot in the summer of 1975, as Spanish dictator Francisco Franco lay dying, and premiered in Madrid's Conde Duque Theatre, on January 26, 1976, forty years after...

Aug 20, 2001 — Carl Dreyer considers the work of art’s soul in this excerpt from Dreyer in Double Reflection.

Nov 15, 1999 — Great comedy cannot be confined within normally accepted boundaries of taste and sensitivity. The essence of the Pythons was that they were always ready to take on formidable, daunting subjects that others might find too dangerous to contemplate. The idea...

Dec 18, 1989 — When Tootsie opened in December, 1982, the ad copy read: “In the next 72 hours this desperate, unemployed actor will secretly audition for the female lead of a soap opera.”  That was the plot line to the movie even when...

Oct 6, 2010 — In response to our invitation to contribute his list of favorite Criterion titles, director Wes Anderson wrote, “I thought my take on a top-ten list might be to simply quote myself from the brief fan letters I periodically write to...

May 25, 2022 — Park returns to the competition in Cannes with a Hitchcockian murder mystery.

Dec 6, 2016 — This elegiac meditation on impermanence showcases Laurie Anderson’s playfully experimental approach to sound and image.

Jan 14, 2015 — Legendary German-born cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (Broadcast News, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas) broke through in film working with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. After shooting Whity and Beware of a Holy Whore for the filmmaker, Ballhaus was enlisted to visualize The...