The Death of Stalin

May 19, 2015 — Charlie Chaplin’s intensely emotional drama is a dream film about show business, history, and death.

Mar 27, 2020 — The cost to the Soviet population due to the war with Germany from 1941 to 1945 has not been definitively established; the best-circulated estimate, about twenty-seven million, is thought by some scholars to be low by many millions. Under Joseph...

Mar 5, 2018 — Along with 132 short films and a slew of masterclasses, installations, discussions, and other events, the Berlin International Film Festival presented 253 features this year. I managed to catch twenty-seven of them, and Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not, winner of...

Nov 29, 2017 — The Sundance Film Festival, whose 2018 edition will run from January 18 through 28, has announced the lineups for its U.S. Dramatic and Documentary Competitions, World Cinema Dramatic and Documentary Competitions, and its Next, Spotlight, Premieres, Documentary Premieres, Midnight, and...

Aug 3, 2017 — We’ve seen the lineups for the Gala and Special Presentations and for the TIFF Docs, Midnight Madness, and Short Cuts programs. Today, the Toronto International Film Festival, whose forty-second edition runs from September 7 through 17, presents its lineup of...

Dec 21, 2018 — New issues of Senses of Cinema and cléo this week, but also healthy seasonal doses of anxiety and lamentation.

Apr 25, 2005 — Andrzej Wajda’s first feature film marks the beginning of the Polish School, the paradigm of Polish cinema that arose from the political and cultural thaw of the mid-1950s.

Aug 13, 2019 — Something uncanny is brewing in George Sikharulidze’s Fatherland. This darkly comedic film transports us to a spring evening in Joseph Stalin’s birthplace—Gori, Georgia—where the townspeople have gathered on the sixty-third anniversary of their long-departed leader’s death. What follows is part...

Sep 16, 2019 — In a dark moment, Laurence Olivier often reached for a laugh. His lofty, somewhat burdensome reputation as his century’s greatest dramatic actor belies the mercurial essence of his craft, which was to seize upon the humanity in each of his...

Jan 21, 2026 — New films by Angela Schanelec, Lance Hammer, and Mahamat-Saleh Haroun will premiere in the competition.