Midnight

Jan 5, 2006 — A gray flannel ghost story in which the living haunt the dead, the least appreciated of Akira Kurosawa’s midperiod collaborations with Toshiro Mifune throws open the windows of Japanese corporate corruption.

Mar 24, 2003 — Straw Dogs turns on a woman’s rape, and one can’t blame pictures for depicting. But the film shows the woman, after some tart resistance, seeming to enjoy it, and this approaches the apex of what a delicate soul might call...

Jul 9, 2001 — John Schlesinger’s classic is an exuberant satire of a society caught between its old ways and the urge to modernize.

Apr 23, 2001 — Released in late 1938, Alexander Nevsky was not only the first sound film to be directed by Sergei Eisenstein, but the director’s political comeback as well. This most famous of Soviet artists had not completed a movie since The Old...

Nov 13, 2000 — Featuring what may be the only 1950s monster that could not be destroyed, this cult classic warns parents to listen to their kids because the world they understood and controlled is over.

Sep 22, 1997 — If one writes a great chapter in a novel, it will seldom be taken out of a book for reasons of time or rhythm. A novel allows you longer arms, a deeper breath. Anthony’s scenes of Kip in England, which...

Jun 27, 1995 — Orson Welles’s Shakespeare adaptation was his first first fully independent feature, made without the resources of Hollywood.

Jun 3, 1991 — Jean Marais on the set of Beauty and the Beast An excerpt from Cocteau: A Biography (1970) by Francis Steegmuller Beauty and the Beast, the first film of Cocteau’s own since The Blood of a Poet, and his finest poem since...

Jun 25, 1989 — A thoroughgoing investigation of the terms “bravery” and “cowardice,” Stanley Kubrick’s early work offers far more than a mere “anti-war” statement, paring with almost surgical precision to the heart of the fear, hubris and mendacity that keep the war machine...

Mar 15, 1989 — When Darling debuted in 1965, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times remarked that director John Schlesinger had “made a film that will set tongues to wagging and moralists wringing their hands.” There was plenty of tongue-wagging over this satirical...