The Call

May 5, 2009 — Irecently had occasion to show Ivan the Terrible in a course on forties world cinema I’m teaching at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, and found it more mind-boggling than ever. This has always been the Eisenstein feature that’s given...

Apr 23, 2009 — These profiles of the real-life Sada Abé and the actress who portrayed her in Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses first appeared in Donald Richie’s 1987 book Different People: Pictures of Some Japanese, and can also be found...

Feb 12, 2007 — In this classical whodunit made just after the close of World War II, swirling sexual frustrations and resentments find expression in a series of apparently motiveless murders.

Jun 23, 2003 — Ermanno Olmi’s seldom-cited debut feature, the 1958 Time Stood Still, is a wonderful film, but it was the one-two punch of his second and third films that put him on the international movie scene map. Il Posto and I Fidanzati...

Jun 3, 2002 — Ronald Neame’s character study examines a talented, eccentric artist, who is also difficult, conniving, uncouth, and thoroughly disreputable.

Jun 3, 2002 — By any standard, The Horse’s Mouth shines as an outstandingly personal work from a decade that often seems the most arid in British cinema. Amid tepid comedies and timid thrillers, it sparkles with conviction and eccentricity—at least that’s how it...

Mar 11, 2002 — This compendium of visual delights displays director Federico Fellini’s team of performers, writers, and designers at full and exhilarating stretch.

Jun 26, 2000 — Kevin Smith writes about his third feature as a sort of penance/valentine for the woman who made him grow up.

Aug 25, 1998 — Abeautiful woman is mysteriously beating the bejesus out of a drunk when he suddenly pulls at her hair and it comes off. The now totally bald woman continues smacking him around with her shoe until he falls to the ground....

Jul 28, 2026 — Seven dynamite nights with Keaton, Chaplin, Lubitsch, Ford, Murnau, Griffith, and Raoul Walsh.