Self Song/Death Song

Feb 5, 2013 — Keisuke Kinoshita’s most experimental film is a resplendent, kabuki-inspired, folk-derived drama about mortality.

Sep 18, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s theatrical spectacle set in early nineteenth-century Paris is an operatic work about passion and artifice.

Aug 30, 2012 — In the 1960s, Mailer, already a literary legend, was inspired by the avant-garde film movement to take a stab at his own, anti-Warholian underground cinema.

Jul 24, 2012 — Trained as a musician, Jean Grémillon became one of French cinema’s most lyrical artists. His most beloved films were made during World War II.

Jun 12, 2012 — Hal Ashby’s delicately off-kilter May-December romance stars two of the unlikeliest countercultural icons of the seventies.

Mar 20, 2012 — Even more than with most documentaries that set out to record events as they happen, there was a lot of luck involved in producing The War Room (1993). When they turned their attention to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992,...

Feb 28, 2012 — In the long history of stage-to-screen translations, there’s never been anything quite like Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), an astonishing hybrid blurring the boundaries between theater and film, rehearsal and performance, actor and character. The production began in...

Dec 13, 2011 — Just what is it that makes Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter (1966) so different, so appealing? The cherubic hero in the neat powder blue suit, who looks like he was torn out of a yakuza pop-up book? That hauntingly cornball theme...

Nov 15, 2011 — “The day I can buy toilet paper in a Polish store, I’ll discuss politics,” Krzysztof Kieślowski told an interviewer in 1989, as he brushed aside a question. He was speaking at the Montreal Film Festival, where he was serving on...

Nov 8, 2011 — Aflurry of publicity around Fanny and Alexander began well before the start of production. Ingmar Bergman said it would be his final film, and he allowed unusual media access to the set, even welcoming a pair of journalists who kept...