Some Voices

Jun 25, 2007 — Chris Marker’s masterpiece is a cinematic essay and travel film made up of asides and digressions that form a portrait of late twentieth-century civilization.

Apr 23, 2007 — Louis Malle’s documentary work adopts certain tenets of cinéma direct—improvisation, minimal crew, the refusal to organize reality—and applies them to a consistently class-conscious, outsider perspective.

Sep 19, 2005 — When I was a teenage cinephile, in the mid-1970s, Masculin féminin was enormously significant to me. It repre­sented France’s nouvelle vague of the sixties, with its youthful, anarchic spirit of freedom and spontaneity. It was in black and white and...

Jul 25, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki stages a fearsome guerrilla night raid on an axis of oppression that includes the state, the church, the U.S. military occupation, and both the commercial exploitation of sexuality and the nonprofit pleasures of carnal love.

May 9, 2005 — This seminal documentary conveys the particular seductiveness and resonance of the dream of going pro for two talented Chicago teenagers.

Jul 19, 2004 — Marcel Carné's third feature is as epochal as any film made in France in the 1930s, exemplifying the style known as “poetic realism.”

Aug 20, 2001 — Carl Dreyer considers the work of art’s soul in this excerpt from Dreyer in Double Reflection.

Aug 20, 2001 — The strangeness of Ordet is something that no number of viewings, God willing, will rub off. I want to stress this strangeness. That Ordet is a great film, one of the greatest ever made, only a rash or foolish person...

Jun 26, 2000 — Kevin Smith writes about his third feature as a sort of penance/valentine for the woman who made him grow up.

Nov 19, 1990 — By facing death, Akira Kurosawa fashions an affirmation of life, characteristically clear-headed in its exploration of man’s fate.