Two to One

Jul 27, 2011 — A sure sign that fall is coming: the Venice and Toronto film festivals (August 31–September 10 and September 8–18, respectively) have begun to announce their lineups. As usual, the schedules of these two important world-cinema showcases share some titles, destined...

Feb 19, 2007 — For a director whose vision is so frequently called pessimistic, Mikio Naruse’s drama exhibits a lightness of touch, deft and coolly understated, like its cocktail jazz score.

Jan 6, 2003 — With its casually comfortable exoticism, abstruse locale, and beautifully sympathetic anti-hero, Julien Duvivier’s film established a narrative paradigm that persists today.

Apr 29, 2002 — Though set in wartime Soviet Union, Grigori Chukhrai’s drama walks away from the genre of war film, creating a portrait of life and problems behind the lines of battle.

Jul 9, 2001 — With its dunderhead millionaires, erudite bums, effulgently dysfunctional families, and beneficent providence, My Man Godfrey is the Depression comedy par excellence. It is also, superficially at least, a movie about the Depression. A suicidal millionaire regains his zest for living...

Sep 27, 1999 — While researching a book on the making of and the feud over the American release of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, I read nearly every review published in the U.S., and saw very few that failed to describe the story as “futuristic”...

Feb 22, 1999 — To experience a film by Japanese B-movie visionary Seijun Suzuki is to experience Japanese cinema in all its frenzied, voluptuous excess. Born in Tokyo in 1923, Seijun Suzuki is best known for a cycle of extraordinary yakuza (gangster) movies he...

Aug 25, 1998 — Here is an honest, visionary, pulp film, stripped of all romanticism, with characterizations and themes more real and relevant today than ever. To watch Shock Corridor now is to experience the complex, wacky, full-blown masterpiece of one of Hollywood’s great...

May 5, 1998 — Borrowing inspiration from doom-laden French crime movies like Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le samouraï and ancient Chinese chronicles of patriotic assassins, John Woo’s film is a passionate cinematic upheaval.

Sep 19, 1994 — The French do not have to take crash courses in order to deal with the man/woman thing. It is in their blood and in their civilization. Hence, they do not have to compensate for a habitual sexism with extravagant portraits...