A Most Violent Year

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.

Aug 25, 2026 — James Gray’s extraordinary debut feature is a painstakingly distilled tale of crime and family dysfunction, captured with a merciless gaze and a sharp attention to idiosyncratic detail.

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

Aug 25, 2020 — Set among immigrants and laborers in an unglamorous corner of the South of France, Toni (1935) fulfills Jean Renoir’s wish to make a film in “a style as close as possible to that of daily encounters,” as he wrote in...

Jul 29, 2014 — Combining a tragic romance and the story of a workers’ strike, this musical melodrama is perhaps Jacques Demy’s most neglected masterpiece.

Apr 21, 2014 — A real-life prison uprising inspired this two-fisted tale directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to make many more films about men in extreme situations.

Aug 4, 2017 — “In an unusual bit of programming synchronicity,” writes Ben Kenigsberg in the New York Times, “IFC Center will show High Plains Drifter—one of Clint Eastwood’s earliest directorial efforts, in which he casts himself as an amoral stranger who agrees to...

Aug 9, 2011 — Gillo Pontecorvo’s incendiary epic commemorates the popular uprising that had succeeded in ousting the French from Algeria in July 1962.

Jan 31, 2005 — Like the movie’s rattletrap trucks lurching down the highway as they carry way-too-heavy loads, the characters in Jules Dassin’s brilliantly volatile Thieves’ Highway struggle under psychological and moral baggage until they can lay their burdens down. Working from a novel...