The First Year

Mar 2, 2016 — Over at the Sight & Sound blog, the BFI has just published an insightful and exhaustive article by Albertine Fox about the brilliant career of Anne-Marie Miéville, the Swiss-born multimedia artist and director of several acclaimed features, including: My Dear...

Jul 28, 2014 — Jacques Demy’s first full-fledged storybook fantasy challenges and subverts traditional fairy-tale norms.

Dec 5, 2012 — In René Clément’s sparkling but menacing anti-noir, the Mediterranean setting is as seductive as Alain Delon’s baby blues.

Sep 25, 2012 — No mere jigsaw movie, David Fincher’s thriller is also a nuanced character study, a satire of corporate culture, and a film about filmmaking.

Feb 23, 2012 — Author John Voelker (a.k.a. Robert Traver) met musician Duke Ellington on the set of Anatomy of a Murder; he wrote this piece about the experience for the Detroit News Sunday Magazine in 1967.

May 16, 2011 — Among the most enduringly popular motives for murder, in films as in life, is the desire to remove an impediment to happiness—to get somebody, once and for all, out of the way. In life, of course, the goal of freeing...

Mar 2, 2010 — If the harrowing, formally daring Hunger, just out in Criterion Blu-ray and DVD editions, left you wanting to deepen your acquaintance with director Steve McQueen’s visceral imagery, you’re in luck, at least if you live in the New York area....

Feb 9, 2009 — Luis Buñuel’s ferociously brilliant The Exterminating Angel (1962) is one of his most provocative and unforgettable works. In it, we watch a trivial breach of etiquette transform into the destruction of civilization. Not only does this story undermine our confidence...

One of cinema’s great subversives and mischief makers, this Spanish master combined surrealist non sequiturs with attacks on the bourgeoisie and the church.

Oct 6, 2007 — In Gus Van Sant’s first feature, gayness—blind, unembarrassed homosexual lust—is the narrative’s driving force.