Life Is Life

Jan 21, 2002 — A fresco conceived on a majestic scale, Marcel Carné’s masterpiece sweeps its audience back to the 1820s, painting the detail of a world obsessed with both theater and crime.

Oct 15, 2001 — The French director’s crime film conveys both the flow and the form of the prison experience.

Jul 9, 2001 — Directed by Bruce Robinson, this eccentric, disquieting satire about Madison Avenue transforms from fevered realism to symbolic fantasy.

Jul 9, 2001 — With its dunderhead millionaires, erudite bums, effulgently dysfunctional families, and beneficent providence, My Man Godfrey is the Depression comedy par excellence. It is also, superficially at least, a movie about the Depression. A suicidal millionaire regains his zest for living...

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...

Feb 19, 2001 — Leaving the theater after the tumultuous world premiere of Do the Right Thing at Cannes in May of 1989, I found myself too shaken to speak, and I avoided the clusters of people where arguments were already heating up. One...

Jan 29, 2001 — Invisible monsters suck out your brains! And that’s just for starters.

Dec 18, 2000 — Elegant humor cloaks despair in Luis Buñuel’s masterwork, wherein greedy characters flee their toxic lives and find refuge in the loneliness of dreams.

Nov 13, 2000 — All the opening bands had finished playing, and it was time for the Stones to come out. The sun was still out and there was plenty of daylight left. The crowd had waited all day to see the Stones perform,...

Oct 30, 2000 — Perry Henzell’s reggae-infused outlaw film reflects the political climate of the times, when anti-government movements were sweeping America and the world.