Under the Sun

Dec 11, 2012 — The climate change expert discusses how Godfrey Reggio’s films presaged widespread concern about global warming and warned about the dangers of consumerism.

Jul 24, 2012 — Trained as a musician, Jean Grémillon became one of French cinema’s most lyrical artists. His most beloved films were made during World War II.

Oct 25, 2011 — An Erle C. Kenton–directed Paramount feature based on the 1896 H. G. Wells novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, Island of Lost Souls (1932) is the story of a mad scientist’s attempts to convert wild animals into human beings by...

Sep 27, 2011 — Internationally, Victor Sjöström is best known for his performance as Professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). But behind that unforgettable face of old age is a younger man, a leading actor who was also the greatest Swedish...

Nov 28, 2010 — “What we need are good old American—and that’s not to be confused with European—Art Films.” So declared the then twenty-nine-year-old beatnik Method actor Dennis Hopper in an unpublished 1965 manifesto. “The whole damn country’s one big real place to utilize...

Sep 26, 2010 — The Thin Red Line, arguably the greatest war film ever made, ended two decades of silence from Terrence Malick, cinema’s wandering auteur. The silence wasn’t entirely self-imposed, since during this time he tried to launch a few productions—including a tale...

May 20, 2010 — Driven to Destruction Nagisa Oshima was a destructive force in Japanese cinema—and he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Intent on exploding taboos and jabbing the eye of the status quo, he created films that leave us with a...

Jul 27, 2009 — We enter Roman Polanski’s harrowing Repulsion as if in the middle of the story, but it’s actually the beginning of the end. Polanski unceremoniously drops us into a beauty salon where a pampered matron takes to task our heroine, a...

Sep 18, 2006 — Nobuo Nakagawa’s legendary, genre-­busting Japanese masterpiece explores the infernal desires that tempt us during our mortal existence—and the afterlife agonies awaiting those who succumb.

Jul 25, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki stages a fearsome guerrilla night raid on an axis of oppression that includes the state, the church, the U.S. military occupation, and both the commercial exploitation of sexuality and the nonprofit pleasures of carnal love.