The Ceremony

Oct 4, 2011 — Director Catherine Breillat writes about the primal pleasures of watching Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious film.

Oct 12, 2010 — This essay originally appeared in the October 1990 issue of Cahiers du cinéma. Translated by Stephen Sarrazin. The Magician is one of Bergman’s most enigmatic films, perhaps his underground masterpiece, one of the keys to his cinema. Traveling actors, maids...

Aug 3, 2010 — Sanshiro Sugata: A Career Blooms Moviegoers the world over know Akira Kurosawa for Rashomon (1950) and the international classics that followed—Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, High and Low. The filmmaker’s dazzling technique made his genre tales about samurai...

Apr 30, 2009 — The concept of “obscenity” is tested when we dare to look at something that we desire to see but have forbidden ourselves to look at. When we feel that everything has been revealed, “obscenity” disappears and there is a certain...

Apr 14, 2026 — New films from Radu Jude, Clio Barnard, Lisandro Alonso, and Alain Cavalier are headed to Cannes.

Jul 11, 2023 — In her audacious debut feature, Cheryl Dunye blends romantic comedy and staged archival material to explore love, friendship, and early U.S. cinema’s history of exclusion.

Dec 6, 2021 — It was a good weekend for Drive My Car, Lady Gaga, and Aleem Khan’s debut feature.

Nov 25, 2020 — A talk with Claudia Weill, a new issue of Cineaste, and an appreciation of playback singer Asha Bhosle are among this week’s highlights.

Jun 23, 2020 — Late in Tokyo Olympiad, Kon Ichikawa’s thrillingly anomalous record of the 1964 Olympic Summer Games, the film documents one of the most taxing contests, the individual modern pentathlon, in a startling montage of still photographs, accompanied by stark sound effects....

Jan 17, 2020 — Of all the weird scenes that populate seventies science-fiction cinema, the most bizarre might be in 1971’s The Omega Man. Based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the film imagines a world in which fallout from a distant war has...