The One

May 4, 2016 — If you listen back through cinema soundtracks from the past half century, you can hear movie music begin to shift from being mere melodious accompaniment to become its own means of storytelling. That’s what writer Sean Doyle argues in the...

Nov 25, 2015 — Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film about one man’s mortality offers a study in postwar Japan, Kurosawa vs. Ozu, and the realization that knowing how to die requires learning how to be alive.

Oct 30, 2015 — Creating the design that graces our cover of Masaki Kobayashi’s haunting set of ghost stories involved inks, a tank of water, and a fair bit of ingenuity.

Jun 1, 2015 — A legionnaire turned fruit seller misses out on Germany’s economic miracle in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s breakthrough melodrama.

Jan 6, 2015 — Kihachi Okamoto's The Sword of Doom is likely to strike the unalerted viewer as an exercise in absurdist violence, tracking the career of a nihilistic swordsman from his gratuitous murder of a defenseless old man to his final descent into...

Dec 24, 2014 — Keisuke Kinoshita’s poignant Morning for the Osone Family looks at grief over World War II from the perspective of one Japanese family. Shot immediately following the country’s surrender, when directors like Kinoshita were no longer under the thumb of wartime...

Dec 11, 2014 — Italian director Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, about the sadomasochistic bond reignited after World War II between a former Nazi commandant (Dirk Bogarde) and a concentration camp prisoner (Charlotte Rampling)—shocked audiences on its release in 1974 for its eroticism and...

Jul 21, 2014 — Anouk Aimée’s beguiling chanteuse, the title character of Jacques Demy’s romantic debut feature, is the figure from whom the director’s entire cinematic world springs.

Jun 27, 2014 — The American war in Vietnam was officially divided into two halves: the military war and “the other war: the war to win the hearts and minds of the people,” which gives Peter Davis’s 1974 documentary its title. Whereas the aim...

Jun 17, 2014 — The brutal lessons of Vietnam remained in America’s national consciousness for a generation. September 11 gave us collective amnesia, and they’ve had to be learned again.