Motheaten Spring

Feb 24, 2009 — On January 12, French cinema lost one of its truest enablers. Claude Berri was as well-known for his support of cinema, both financial and critical, as he was for his own filmmaking. The actor turned director-writer-producer made twenty-three films (the...

Jan 25, 2009 — Conventional wisdom once held that any European film worth seeing passed through the New York Film Festival. Still, when I first began reviewing movies for the Village Voice in the late seventies, there were some legendary exceptions: Tarkovsky’s The Mirror,...

This patient observer of everyday life in Japan has been enormously influential among filmmakers seeking a cinema of economy and poetry.

Jul 21, 2008 — Carl Theodor Dreyer’s elliptical and dreamlike vampire film defies definitive shots at interpretation.

Jun 12, 2008 — Spring is ready to surrender to summer here in the Big Apple, and in keeping with my intentions, I sat down and watched The Love Parade and Monte Carlo from the Lubitsch Musicals Eclipse set. I found them to be...

May 26, 2008 — Though producer Alexander Korda’s adventure movie forms part of a continued tradition of representing the East by purposefully occluding the reality of it, it celebrates the Arabian fantasy as a site of childlike wonder.

May 12, 2008 — This intensely personal work about a self-destructive young man would help alleviate Louis Malle’s doubts about his career.

Apr 21, 2008 — There’s an irony to the fact that Japanese master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu lived his life as a bachelor, for he made some of the world’s most insightful, lived-in, and emotionally authentic films about marriage and parenthood.

Apr 14, 2008 — Allen Baron’s stark, moody Blast of Silence (1961) is a movie of many strange distinctions. It’s among the last of the true film noirs, those fatalistic black-and-white urban crime dramas that darkened the American screen so gloriously in the years...

Mar 11, 2008 — There’s no real rhyme or reason to explain which Criterion films I end up watching. For example, I saw Breathless over the holiday break after Abbey convinced me to give Godard a chance. Then I watched The Seventh Seal in...