The Late Show

Nov 27, 2008 — Despite Samuel Fuller’s career-long penchant for giving controversial subjects a punchy, exploitation-movie spin, his twenty-first feature was the first to suffer outright suppression.

Feb 18, 2008 — At the climax of Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), a helicopter descends from the night sky onto a plaza where the colonial buildings are ablaze and an army of mercenaries is disintegrating . . .

Jan 21, 2008 — In September 1997, I saw Agnès Varda introduce a brand-new 35 mm print of her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (made in 1954), to an admiring audience at Yale University. More astonishing than the luminous black-and-white images was Varda’s...

Nov 12, 2007 — What is left of Berlin Alexanderplatz, this endless canon of the sublime and the trivial, is thus a perpetuum mobile of the human dance of love and death.

Feb 12, 2007 — Vittorio De Sica’s seminal drama renounces “egoism” for collective concern, envisioning a cinema of impassioned social conscience.

Dec 4, 2006 — William Greaves’s masterpiece uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary.

Nov 27, 2006 — Centered on the destruction wrought by unbridled female eros, Pandora’s Box would, in its shockingly modern, instinct-driven psychology, end up defining both its director and its star.

Oct 24, 2005 — Kihachi Okamoto’s subversion of the samurai movie possesses the same gritty, stark realism with regard to imagery and body count, yet the tone is decidedly comic.

Apr 25, 2005 — Pietro Germi offers locomotive relief in this comedy about the horrors of inertia.

Jan 17, 2005 — Jacques Becker’s crime film contains plenty of the requisite genre elements—double-crossings, violence, kidnappings, and gun battles—but it’s also a pensive meditation on age, friendship, and lost opportunities.