The Hero

Apr 30, 2019 — With these twin monuments of Hong Kong action filmmaking, Jackie Chan catapulted to international stardom, perfecting a unique blend of athleticism and populism.

Dec 22, 2016 — Repertory PicksIf you’re in Vancouver for the holidays, stop by the Cinematheque for the theatrical version of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, which screens as part of the weeklong series Essential Cinema! Essential Big Screen! Seen through the eyes of...

May 17, 2011 — “There was a strong influence of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal throughout this film,” director Masahiro Shinoda would later remember of his 1964 squid-ink noir Pale Flower, made in the days when his career as a filmmaker and founding figure of...

Jan 11, 2011 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Army of Shadows (1969) gives a dramatic account of the extreme dangers faced by the French who resisted the German occupation of 1940–1944. The time of the story is unspecified, but it is probably 1943, late enough...

Sep 10, 2009 — Is That Hamilton Woman, starring Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier at their most heart-stoppingly beautiful and mutually enraptured, one of the most romantic movies ever made because or in spite of the fact that it was designed as propaganda? It...

May 11, 2009 — Novelists learn not to expect too much when their books are made into movies. Obviously, great fiction has been turned into great cinema, but the dents and scrapes that so many classics have sustained on the rocky road from the...

May 22, 2012 — These five films chart the unlikely ascendance of a hero of American underground cinema.

The actor, who stars in Todd Solondz’s Happiness, shares his appreciation for the playwright behind the source material of George Cukor’s Holiday; praises It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World as one of the funniest films he has ever seen;...

Nov 8, 2022 — In her first film that places a male character front and center, Jane Campion trains her unsparing gaze on the brutality of patriarchal power and the pain of repressed homoerotic desire.

May 29, 2025 — Women of the French New Wave, New York in the 1960s, and the scenes behind the scenes are among the many subjects tackled this month.