Girls Will Be Girls

Sep 18, 2006 — Released in 1973, in the dying days of General Franco’s forty-year dictatorship, The Spirit of the Beehive soon established itself as the consummate masterpiece of Spanish cinema. Yet, strangely, many of the gifted artists who collaborated on Víctor Erice’s first...

Aug 14, 2006 — It’s both hard and not so hard to believe that Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales were conceived—indeed, written initially—as a novel. On the one hand, he’s the grand master of dialogue as an instrument of narrative. His characters muse, reflect, analyze,...

Jul 25, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki stages a fearsome guerrilla night raid on an axis of oppression that includes the state, the church, the U.S. military occupation, and both the commercial exploitation of sexuality and the nonprofit pleasures of carnal love.

Jun 27, 2005 — Ko Nakahira’s Nikkatsu Studio youth flick helped transform postwar Japanese cinema.

Mar 14, 2005 — A director is naturally a man like everyone else. Yet his life isn’t normal. For us, seeing is a necessity. For a painter, too, the problem is to see. But while the painter has to discover a static reality, or...

Feb 14, 2005 — A touchstone of Jean-Luc Godard‘s political period, the film plays with the idea of recording working-class history as it is happening.

Aug 18, 2003 — Ingmar Bergman’s chamber film is his most concentrated inquiry into the significance of religion, and of Lutheranism specifically.

Apr 28, 2003 — François Truffaut’s third Antoine Doinel installment is a perpetual juggling act by which harsh truths are disguised as light jokes.

Apr 28, 2003 — François Truffaut’s short Antoine Doinel film exposes an entire universe of male adolescent experience.

Jun 3, 2002 — Ronald Neame’s character study examines a talented, eccentric artist, who is also difficult, conniving, uncouth, and thoroughly disreputable.