The World's End

Mar 28, 2011 — Topsy-Turvy is both an anomaly among the films of Mike Leigh and, contrary as it may seem, a Rosetta stone. On the one hand, it is Leigh’s only costume picture and only biopic—a far cry from the bittersweet, realistic films...

Jan 11, 2011 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Army of Shadows (1969) gives a dramatic account of the extreme dangers faced by the French who resisted the German occupation of 1940–1944. The time of the story is unspecified, but it is probably 1943, late enough...

Dec 7, 2010 — In 1981, it seemed to me that a new era of fantastic cinema was upon us.

Jul 21, 2008 — Carl Theodor Dreyer’s elliptical and dreamlike vampire film defies definitive shots at interpretation.

Dec 6, 2007 — It’s been one of those weeks. First we learned we’d made a mastering error on our Mala Noche edition. Then the first run of the new collectors’ set Ingmar Bergman: Four Masterworks shipped with the wrong disc—the Essential Art House:...

Jun 13, 2005 — Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. The film’s steady accumulation of incident,...

Jun 8, 2022 — The Indian director, actor, and producer’s early death has enshrined him as a tragic icon in public memory. But there is more to his art than misery.

Jan 25, 2018 — Charlie Kaufman, pictured above at work on his last feature, Anomalisa (2015), with co-director Duke Johnson, “is set to write and direct a film adaptation of Iain Reid’s internationally best selling novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things for Netflix,” announces...

Oct 7, 2017 — “Claire Denis’s new film, Let the Sun Shine In, about a middle-aged woman’s romantic adventures, refracts personal experience in the form of a modernistic screwball comedy,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “Juliette Binoche brings luminous intensity and wicked humor...

Nov 20, 2023 — This month brings new books on Godard and Bergman, novelists moonlighting as film critics, and biographies of Lena Horne and Elizabeth Taylor.