The Small Back Room

Jan 14, 2008 — As Japan was coming out of World War II, Akira Kurosawa was coming into his own as a filmmaker.

Sep 23, 2021 — Gina Prince-Bythewood’s iconic debut portrays Black love without forcing its heroine to compromise herself and her ambitions.

May 27, 2020 — London-based director Sandhya Suri already had several acclaimed documentaries to her name—including I Is for India (2005) and Around India with a Movie Camera (2018)—when she decided to make her first foray into narrative filmmaking. Inspired by some of the...

May 22, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so common that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. But when this action appears in a movie, it is revealed as more than the original mode...

Apr 24, 2015 — Atypical in style and subject, Yasujiro Ozu’s early crime dramas show a future master brilliantly experimenting with camera and editing.

Aug 13, 2018 — Looking back on the highlights of the seventy-first edition.

Feb 12, 2020 — If you were born in Mexico City in the second half of  the twentieth century, you grew up feeling that everything could come tumbling down in a matter of minutes. You grew up amid the reverberation of past earthquakes—all their...

Mar 2, 2018 — “This was a singular experience,” writes novelist Walter Mosley, who’s revisited Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967) and turns in a powerful piece in the Hollywood Reporter. On the one hand, the “belief in the North as...

Jun 16, 2014 — Georges Franju evokes the surreal silent serials of Louis Feuillade while constructing his own personal cinematic paradise.

Sep 9, 2022 — New films by Andrew Dominik, Paul Schrader, Rebecca Zlotowski, Alice Diop, and Florian Zeller premiere in Venice.