The Great Lie

Aug 19, 2014 — Alfonso Cuaron, a filmmaker congenitally allergic to creative constriction, made his most liberated movie with this erotic, moving, often funny threesome tale.

May 13, 2014 — Few national cinemas have confronted the issue of preparedness for war with the creative vigor of England’s. Thorold Dickinson’s The Next of Kin (1942), Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? (1942, from a story by Graham Greene), and, of course,...

Jul 22, 2013 — Gabriel Axel’s exquisite adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s short tale of grace through art provides spiritual and sensual sustenance.

Mar 18, 2013 — Using a 1958 murder spree as a narrative springboard, Terrence Malick fashioned a fractured fairy tale about American innocence lost.

Oct 23, 2012 — After winning an Oscar, John Schlesinger used his newfound artistic freedom to make a personal film in which homosexuality is treated as groundbreakingly ordinary.

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...

Mar 27, 2012 — Good wartime propaganda films are as rare as good wars. Noël Coward and David Lean’s In Which We Serve, which had its premiere in Great Britain in September 1942, when the nation was entering the fourth year of hostilities with...

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...

Aug 30, 2011 — “It is much less a film than it is myself,” Jean Cocteau wrote to a friend at the time he was making Orpheus (1950), “a kind of projection of the things that are important to me.” As with many of...

May 3, 2011 — Ingmar Bergman’s exquisite carnal comedy turns a set of boudoir farce conventions into lyrical poetry.