A Most Violent Year

Nov 4, 2025 — The director of La commune and The War Game shook up viewers with dramatizations historical conflicts and imminent futures.

Apr 29, 2022 — This week swerves from the slick cinéma du look to the harshest punk noise.

Nov 18, 2021 — Brief notes on films arriving from Mike Mills, Tatiana Huezo, Jane Campion, Robert Greene, and Radu Jude.

Feb 18, 2014 — The immediacy of an ongoing war electrifies Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful second Hollywood feature.

May 8, 2012 — To start on a personal note: I wrote a book about La haine that came out in November 2005, just as the Paris suburbs (banlieues) erupted in an unprecedented wave of violence. Every night, as in the Bob Marley song we...

Apr 12, 2011 — With his 1970 gangster epic Le cercle rouge, Jean-Pierre Melville finally landed his white whale.

Dec 7, 2010 — “Eroticism,” Luis Buñuel told an interviewer, “is a diabolic pleasure that is related to death and rotting flesh.” No filmmaker conveys this idea with more ingenuity and macabre gusto than David Cronenberg, whose movies (hilariously, terrifyingly) illustrate the equation of...

Jan 25, 2009 — Conventional wisdom once held that any European film worth seeing passed through the New York Film Festival. Still, when I first began reviewing movies for the Village Voice in the late seventies, there were some legendary exceptions: Tarkovsky’s The Mirror,...

Nov 16, 2021 — Tsui Hark’s epic martial-arts saga revolutionized Hong Kong cinema by presenting a complex portrait of modern Chinese history and setting a gold standard in action choreography.

Jan 4, 2024 — Critics and filmmakers remember a subtle giant of the stage and screen.