Hard to Be a God

Aug 24, 2011 — NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers. Not long into Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine (2007), a melodrama about suffering, salvation, and the dangerously blurred line between belief and madness, the heroine encounters the first of several challenges to her way of...

May 12, 2008 — If ever an actor could reconcile his natural-born swagger with a kind of pervasive lethargy it was Maurice Ronet, the star of Louis Malle’s staggering psychological drama.

Oct 25, 2024 — An underseen gem of the Czechoslovak New Wave and an ambitious history of Hindi cinema are among this week’s highlights.

Jan 3, 2020 — This week we’ve been reading about Orson Welles, Nina Menkes, Martin Scorsese, Luc Moullet, and the late Robert Frank.

Jan 13, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s characters play an endlessly layered game of dress-up in this tale of sadomasochistic love.

Aug 11, 2026 — Set in 1930s French West Africa, Bertrand Tavernier’s hard-to-classify adaptation of the Jim Thompson novel Pop. 1280 offers an apocalyptic vision of a society in which institutions have abdicated their moral authority.

Feb 12, 2007 — Vittorio De Sica’s seminal drama renounces “egoism” for collective concern, envisioning a cinema of impassioned social conscience.

Jun 22, 2010 — In the autumn of 1989, the Iranian magazine Sorush printed a story about an unusual crime: a poor man had been arrested for impersonating a celebrated film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, to a middle-class family in northern Tehran. Although the accused,...

Jul 8, 2022 — The actor brought a wiry tension to his roles in The Godfather, Thief, and Misery.

Feb 23, 2017 — The week before Get Out opened to groundbreaking box-office success, we spoke with the director about the fine line between comedy and horror.