Ignasi M.

Nov 11, 2008 — Groundbreaking modernist artist Paul Strand (1890–1976) might have been better known for his photography than his filmmaking, but the two films he directed are both extraordinary testaments to his brilliance. The first, his silent 1921 avant-garde masterpiece Manhatta, a luminous...

Nov 9, 2008 — “Though the Maysles are best known for their hippie-era music docs Monterey Pop and Gimme Shelter, as well as the opaque weirdness of Grey Gardens from 1975, Salesman stands as the movie where they really found their voice as leading...

Nov 2, 2008 — To see the gorgeous Fanfan la Tulipe is to go back in time twice over: to the film’s eighteenth-century French setting and to the international cinema world of more than fifty years ago, when this genial action farce was initially...

This patient observer of everyday life in Japan has been enormously influential among filmmakers seeking a cinema of economy and poetry.

Oct 27, 2008 — Variety reported today that Mike Nichols is getting ready to direct a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s beloved 1963 thriller High and Low, from a new screenplay by David Mamet, and likely to be executive produced by Martin Scorsese, who originally...

Once widely misunderstood, this French master of suspense dealt in misanthropic, black-humored tales and is now recognized to be among the greatest directors of the 1950s.

Oct 20, 2008 — Though he had been directing films since the silent era, Kenji Mizoguchi didn’t become an international sensation until after the Second World War, benefiting from a new fascination with Japan’s cinematic output.

Oct 20, 2008 — Costa-Gavras’s film pointedly raised issues that for many people were only dimly in the air at the time, and which have become more and more unavoidable in recent years, as the United States has openly assumed its imperial role.

Oct 16, 2008 — Michael Boland’s design for Criterion’s special edition release of Vampyr has gotten some special attention of its own, from the prestigious design journal Communications Arts. In the Exhibit section—highlighting “outstanding examples of graphic design and advertising”—of the journal’s website, editors...

Oct 9, 2008 — Lola Montès, Max Ophuls’s final film and some would say greatest masterpiece, opened today in New York and Los Angeles in what is being touted as the definitive restoration. Butchered by its producers and a flop on initial release in...