Hero

Jul 20, 2016 — In his staggeringly ambitious masterwork A Touch of Zen, Chinese filmmaker King Hu imbues dynamic scenes of combat with balletic grace and audacious stylistic experimentation.

Jul 14, 2016 — In honor of the actor’s birthday, we revisit an interview he gave to Interview magazine in 1991, following the release of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.

Jun 23, 2016 — Repertory PicksThis week, the TIFF Cinematheque in Toronto will show Akira Kurosawa’s 1960 dramatic thriller The Bad Sleep Well as part of its summer series of special screenings. Starring the Japanese screen icon and longtime Kurosawa collaborator Toshiro Mifune, the...

May 24, 2016 — In The Player, Robert Altman’s early nineties comeback film, the director brilliantly skewers Hollywood—getting all the details right, as only he could—while constructing his own kind of Hollywood Movie.

May 10, 2016 — Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place imbues the conventions of film noir with a subtle, tense vulnerability that lends a naturalistic weight to the film’s powerful emotional impact.

Mar 15, 2016 — Set during the height of McCarthy-era paranoia and arriving in 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Frankenheimer’s high-anxiety Communist conspiracy thriller tapped into the darkest fears of Cold War America.

Jan 20, 2016 — Earlier this month, we lost Vilmos Zsigmond, the venerated Hungarian cinematographer. Not only was he one of the greatest directors of photography in the world—known for his influential work with Robert Altman, Steven Spielberg, and Brian De Palma, among others—Zsigmond...

Jan 19, 2016 — Inside Llewyn Davis takes its protagonist on a Hero’s Journey of characteristically Coen-esque proportions—a voyage at turns serious and comic, and framed by an exquisitely curated selection of folk melodies.

Jan 14, 2016 — For the lead role of Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend, a melancholy neonoir that fused Wenders’s New German sensibility with classic Hollywood drama, the director needed an actor who could convey menace with complexity. Wenders had his...

Jan 12, 2016 — In German filmmaker Wim Wenders’s high-strung thriller, adapted from two Patricia Highsmith novels, Dennis Hopper plays sociopathic con man Tom Ripley as a “hopped-up elf from hell” who works his charms on a winsome and guileless Bruno Ganz.