The First Time

Feb 7, 2011 — Death looms over the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda. His first fiction feature, Maborosi (1995), is a quiet study of bereavement, about a young woman struggling to move on after her husband’s inexplicable suicide. In After Life (1998), a supernatural fable...

Nov 27, 2006 — Centered on the destruction wrought by unbridled female eros, Pandora’s Box would, in its shockingly modern, instinct-driven psychology, end up defining both its director and its star.

Jul 11, 2005 — The trickily variant sensibilities of the three daydreams and their long duration are what mark Unfaithfully Yours as a stray modernist object.

Jul 13, 2021 — One of the most remarkable Black films released in the 1990s, Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992) is an uncompromising film noir that uses the so-called war on drugs as its backdrop. The story follows Russell Stevens (Laurence Fishburne) as he...

Sep 29, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 What can it mean for cinema to be revolutionary? Answering a version of this question in a 1977 interview, the Cuban filmmaker Humberto Solás stressed the importance of real-world context. In a capitalist...

Nov 25, 2016 — Did You See This? In celebration of TIFF’s ongoing series Imitations of Life: The Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Guy Maddin takes a look at the German master’s predilection for lush color palettes. In his latest TCM Diary for Film...

Oct 13, 2016 — From its diffusely structured narrative to its innovative cinematography, this radical western is a showcase for Robert Altman’s iconoclastic style.

Aug 20, 2015 — You may recognize Jason Polan’s often wacky, always charming drawings from our newsletter emails. But the artist, whose illustrations have also been published in the New Yorker, Metropolis, and the New York Times, has his sights set on more than...

Mar 27, 2012 — Coward and Lean? It may not sound as natural as Launder and Gilliat or Powell and Pressburger, perhaps because we don’t instinctively think of Noël Coward as a filmmaker or of David Lean as part of a team. But they...