Back in Action

May 11, 2009 — Novelists learn not to expect too much when their books are made into movies. Obviously, great fiction has been turned into great cinema, but the dents and scrapes that so many classics have sustained on the rocky road from the...

Mar 16, 2009 — This long-underappreciated giant of Japanese cinema was an innovative visual stylist and a born storyteller who preferred to make films about outsiders.

Jun 16, 2008 — Claude Sautet occupies a unique place in French cinema. Although he directed some of the biggest hits of the seventies and worked with some of the biggest stars, few critics considered him an “auteur” in his lifetime. Paradoxically, it was...

Nov 19, 2007 — Ingmar Bergman made some outstanding films before Sawdust and Tinsel (1953). But that film, released in America under the meretricious title The Naked Night—and known in Sweden as The Clown’s Evening—was the first that no other director could have made....

Aug 13, 2007 — Samuel Fuller knew how to handle a gun from his army days, and this experience colored all of his filmmaking, which he began at the age of thirty-six.

Nov 21, 2005 — Akira Kurosawa’s late masterpiece is a tragedy fed by Shakespeare, Noh, and the samurai epic; it shows human brutality, warfare, and suffering as if from the eye of a dispassionate God.

Jan 31, 2005 — Like the movie’s rattletrap trucks lurching down the highway as they carry way-too-heavy loads, the characters in Jules Dassin’s brilliantly volatile Thieves’ Highway struggle under psychological and moral baggage until they can lay their burdens down. Working from a novel...

Sep 17, 2001 — Jirí Menzel’s war comedy is an absurdist symphony of self-absorption and impotence.

Aug 17, 1992 — Blackmail was Alfred Hitchcock’s tenth picture in England, his second thriller and first British talkie—and it marked an important crossroads in film history. Hitchcock shot the film in 1929 as a silent picture, but when it was ready for silent...

Nov 11, 2002 — Continued from Anatomy of a Love Festival - Part One The real turn-on, though, was the music—twenty-two hours of it, divided into solid chunks that usually ran more than thirty minutes. Friday night was the epitome of what San Francisco...