The New Spirit

Mar 16, 2009 — This long-underappreciated giant of Japanese cinema was an innovative visual stylist and a born storyteller who preferred to make films about outsiders.

Aug 20, 2001 — Carl Dreyer considers the work of art’s soul in this excerpt from Dreyer in Double Reflection.

Apr 14, 2026 — Consider, for a moment, the jewel thief. No, not like the gang that, at the time of this writing, recently robbed the Louvre in Paris, France. Think rather of one you might find in Paris, Paramount. After all, as director...

Sep 22, 2021 — Writer-director John Huston blasted the fusty pieties that pervaded big-studio filmmaking in the post-Code era, whether as the progenitor of film noir with The Maltese Falcon (1941) or the brainy daredevil who threaded critiques of frontier capitalism, gold lust, and...

Sep 13, 2023 — Early reviewers find that, while the master of animation’s twelfth feature may be hard to follow, it’s impossible to resist.

Nov 20, 2023 — This month brings new books on Godard and Bergman, novelists moonlighting as film critics, and biographies of Lena Horne and Elizabeth Taylor.

Nov 2, 2021 — Federico Fellini’s earliest masterpiece is a story of despair and optimism, cruelty and salvation, that occasioned the director’s ascent to stardom.

May 10, 2019 — This week has seen surveys of the careers of Abbas Kiarostami and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and deep dives into milestone works by George Cukor and Andrei Tarkovsky.

Aug 20, 2018 — A survey of some of the most notable titles to have appeared over the summer.

Jan 20, 2018 — On what would have been Saul Turell’s ninety-seventh birthday, Peter Cowie celebrates the man who was the beating heart behind Janus Films.