The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix

May 24, 2017 — Cannes kicked off the 1980s with a Palme d’Or win for a giant of Japanese cinema entering the final stages of his career. Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (the title of which literally translates as “shadow warrior”) follows a small-time thief who...

Jan 19, 2017 — Repertory PicksThis week in Seattle, Washington, the Grand Illusion Cinema screens a towering portrait of political treachery, Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 Throne of Blood. Transposing Macbeth to medieval Japan, this Shakespearean masterpiece gives Toshiro Mifune one of the most intense roles...

May 1, 2014 — Repertory PicksCinema lovers in New York will have their calendars full for the coming month. Museum of the Moving Image is hosting the most comprehensive United States retrospective of Kenji Mizoguchi films in decades. Usually named right below Akira Kurosawa...

May 28, 2013 — Mike Leigh’s breakthrough is a funny film about serious things, and an emotional and slyly political take on consumer culture.

May 14, 2013 — Delmer Daves’s classic western is psychologically probing, magnificently shot, and fascinatingly ambiguous.

Oct 25, 2012 — The following piece by Sunday Bloody Sunday screenwriter Penelope Gilliatt originally appeared as the introduction to the 1971 U.S. publication of the script. A friend of mine who had started scrubbing at fourteen and went on to be a barmaid...

Sep 20, 2012 — The following is excerpted from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by the late Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona...

Sep 11, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled...

Mar 26, 2012 — A Night to Remember, the 1958 British film adaptation of Walter Lord’s 1955 book about the brief life and agonizing death of the Titanic, has proven unsinkable. With its Olympian yet unfailingly life-size view of the disaster that scuttled illusions...

Aug 31, 2011 — Let there be no trouble, no pranks . . . Do you realize the enormity of our moral responsibility? —Headmaster in Zéro de conduite There is nothing in the history of movies that mirrors or matches the achievement of Jean...