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Aug 18, 2009 — Jacques Tati’s masterpiece converts work into play so pleasurably that it turns the very acts of seeing and hearing into a form of dancing.

Aug 17, 2009 — Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece, a mesmerizing study of stasis and containment, time and domestic anxiety. Stretching its title character’s daily household routine in long, stark takes, Akerman’s film simultaneously allows viewers to...

Jul 22, 2009 — Made in 1966 (so quickly that it could almost be considered an improvisation), Jean-Luc Godard’s twelfth feature is arguably the most quintessentially “Godardian” of the filmmaker’s early period— but for those of us in the United States, it is also...

Jul 16, 2009 — The venerable critic Andrew Sarris, now eighty-one years old, gets his due in a lovely profile in the New York Times by Michael Powell (no, not that one). This die-hard auteurist, who has contributed writing and been featured in on-screen...

Jul 14, 2009 — Tough title to live up to. The lofty three-word phrase Al Reinert chose for his 1989 documentary on the Apollo space program comes from the plaque the first men on the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, left there in...

Jul 10, 2009 — In the epic table talk à clef that is My Dinner with André, André, a theater director (played by theater director André Gregory), tells his old friend Wally (played by playwright and actor Wallace Shawn) about a long journey he...

Jul 8, 2009 — I’ll never forget that first step on the moon. I was at the home of a high school classmate in Fort Worth on the evening of July 20, 1969. The Eagle had landed that afternoon, and we’d been waiting for...

Jun 30, 2009 — With the fortieth anniversary of the first lunar landing nearly upon us (which we’re celebrating at Criterion with new DVD and Blu-ray special editions of the 1989 documentary For All Mankind), the brave men of the Apollo missions are once...

Jun 25, 2009 — Robert Koehler takes a long “second look” at Death of a Cyclist in the summer 2009 issue of Cineaste, sizing up Juan Antonio Bardem’s 1955 political melodrama in terms of Spain’s national identity and the legacy of neorealism. Check it...

Jun 22, 2009 — So much critical ink has been shed over Last Year at Marienbad that one might wonder if the flood of commentary, once receded, would take the film along with it. Alain Resnais’ second feature has been lavishly praised and royally...