Can-Can

Aug 2, 2004 — The three film’s in Renoir’s trilogy are comic period fantasies in dazzling color, offering a kind of continuous, bustling choreography in which shifting power relations between upper and lower classes and between spectators and performers literally turn the world into...

Aug 2, 2004 — Dismissed as minor Jean Renoir, the film deserves better, especially when seen in the larger context of numerous American and European films of the 1950s and their shared preoccupation with theater and performance.

Aug 2, 2004 — Anna Magnani’s flair for demotic street comedy was transfigured into stylized nobility by sumptuous costuming and Jean Renoir’s formal camera work.

Aug 2, 2004 — This kinetic and ineffably voluptuous musical is the happiest and most exuberant ripple in Jean Renoir’s career as a river of personal expression.

Jul 19, 2004 — In Yasujiro Ozu’s hands, the extended-family drama widened its focus to encompass friends, neighbors, and employers.

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.”

May 24, 2004 — By piling on naturalistic details to keep the heat constantly in our minds, Akira Kurosawa creates a visual and behavioral excess that highlights the fixation of his hero on retrieving his stolen gun.

May 24, 2004 — Stray Dog, the ninth film directed by Akira Kurosawa, is a detective story that’s also meant to function as a commentary on the desperate social conditions of postwar Japan: a kind of neorealist cop movie.

Apr 19, 2004 — “Floating weeds, drifting down the leisurely river of our lives,” has long been a favored metaphor in Japanese prose and poetry. This plant, the ukigusa (duckweed in English), floating aimlessly, carried by stronger currents, is seen as emblematic of our...

Mar 15, 2004 — This Japanese classic’s guiding passion is hunger, and its central image—a gaping black hole in the earth—is that of an all-consuming maw.