Written on the Wind

May 25, 2017 — “The botched bank robbery is a well-worn genre staple, but has ever a heist gone quite so wrong to quite such electric, propulsive effect as in Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time?” asks Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “Bouncing wildly...

Mar 17, 2016 — Decades later, Ingmar Bergman’s self-reflexive masterpiece remains a provocative enigma worthy of close investigation.

Jan 13, 2016 — In Bitter Rice, Giuseppe De Santis focused his lens on the world of Italy’s female rice workers, for a story that’s part social commentary, part pulp melodrama—and introduced the world to a dazzling young actress named Silvana Mangano.

Nov 24, 2015 — In Dont Look Back, legendary documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker employs his revolutionary new camera and Direct Cinema style to capture the multiple essences and contradictions of a young Bob Dylan making his way across England in 1965.

Aug 13, 2015 — The films Agnès Varda made while living on the West Coast of the United States are some of the most searching and challenging of her stellar career.

Jan 20, 2015 — Here he is: the real, unreal Guy Maddin, in his phantasmagorical, polymathic stew of sex, memory, and dreams.

Sep 16, 2013 — Ingmar Bergman plumbs the depths of a fractured family and gives Ingrid Bergman a shocking star role.

Dec 13, 2011 — Seijun Suzuki’s delirious, absurdist deconstruction of the crime genre is the strangest film the director made at Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest film company.

Mar 22, 2011 — In 1985, deep into the twelve-year reign of the Reagan-Bush administration, Rob Epstein mounted a Hollywood stage with Richard Schmiechen, both men resplendent in tuxedos. Epstein was only twenty-nine years old. The director had just made history, with producer Schmiechen,...

Mar 30, 2010 — The work of Pedro Costa has progressed in slow, measured steps, but each step has been a giant leap. His slowness is both the condition and the consequence of ethical standards he shares with precious few directors of his generation....