To Be and to Have

May 9, 2005 — This seminal documentary conveys the particular seductiveness and resonance of the dream of going pro for two talented Chicago teenagers.

Aug 18, 2003 — The third installment in Ingmar Bergman’s trilogy about religious faith sees the auteur coming to terms with the pious rigidity and strangled emotional life of his own upbringing.

May 26, 2003 — Derek Jarman’s early film epitomizes the despairing and angry mood of Britain in the mid-seventies—a country facing economic recession, virtual war with the IRA, and an uncertain post-imperial future.

Apr 28, 2003 — The sense of the difficulty of a real assumption of adulthood gives François Truffaut’s final Antoine Doinel film an undercurrent of anguish, despite its surface lightness.

Sep 23, 2002 — René Clair’s early sound film is an iconic vision of lower-class Paris bursting with charm and romance.

Sep 9, 2002 — With her debut feature, Lynne Ramsay confirmed herself as one of the most distinct and important voices to emerge from the United Kingdom in recent years.

Aug 19, 2002 — René Clair’s musical comedy comprises a window on a particular lost black and white neverworld—bouncy with melody, soaked in spring light, wistful about the conflicted relationship between serendipity and love.

Feb 11, 2002 — The last, best, and funniest movie Milos Forman would make in his native Czechoslovakia is a deceptively simple miniature.

Jan 29, 2001 — In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s drama, the characters abandon their twin faiths, in God and the British Empire, and turn themselves over to more ancient and dangerous powers.

Sep 8, 1998 — Paul Verhoeven’s breakthrough American film gleefully satirizes the Reagan era’s pet doctrines of free enterprise and privatization.