Body and Soul

Feb 22, 2011 — Andrea Arnold seemed to emerge out of nowhere with Red Road (2006), her revelatory, shrewdly observed debut feature about voyeurism and sexual revenge. That film won Arnold multiple awards, and she had already earned an Oscar for her short Wasp...

Dec 1, 2009 — In the eight films he’s made since 1991, Arnaud Desplechin has been developing a visionary world, a personal style that goes against the grain of standard cinematic practice today. He’s a master of ensemble mise-en-scène and a brilliant director of...

Sep 3, 2007 — Aconversation, a misunderstanding. The basic pattern in many of Jim Jarmusch’s films is two characters, sometimes three, bound together by chance and wandering along toward an ill-defined goal, each trying all the while to get to know the other or...

Jul 29, 2002 — Viewing Kon Ichikawa’s film of the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo, it is apparent that even then his main idea (despite the more than 150 cameras available to him) was to present a fragmented picture of the Games, rather than...

Jul 21, 1998 — Despite its title, Samurai II, Duel at Ichijoji Temple, is not really an action film. It has more than its share of action and violence, to be sure—the duel between Musashi Miyamoto (Toshiro Mifune) and the chain-and-sickle master that opens...

May 22, 2025 — The jury honors tales of haunted appliances, an exiled community, and a life-changing diagnosis.

Sep 10, 2024 — Andrew Haigh explores loss and queer loneliness in this exquisite, twilit tangle of lives and loves separated by space, time, and personal defenses.

Jan 26, 2023 — This great director from the golden age of Mexican cinema drew upon a wide range of styles to explore the conflict between tradition and modernity.

Sep 21, 2021 — Johnnie To pays homage to Akira Kurosawa in this martial arts drama about the virtue of struggle and self-improvement.

May 19, 2020 — The range was remarkable, but the projects Piccoli selected and the directors he chose to work with are what make his body of work essential.