The Force

Jan 14, 2008 — As Japan was coming out of World War II, Akira Kurosawa was coming into his own as a filmmaker.

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.

Aug 18, 2003 — One of the Swedish director’s most representative works, this drama’s portentousness, banked intensity, and recondite symbolism come near to embodying the popular stereotype of the Bergmanesque.

Jul 13, 2022 — Stylistically informed by film noir, Martin Scorsese’s searing drama plumbs male violence and rage through a boxing champ’s self-destruction.

Feb 23, 2021 — Released in 1985, during the exuberant flowering of films by women brought on by second-wave feminism, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk now feels less of those years than like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, an early challenge to a cultural...

Nov 25, 2020 — “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a fatal abyss.” Wanda in The White Sheik (1952) I have a vivid memory from the first film-studies class I enrolled in, a class on Italian neorealism, where the weekly...

Mar 21, 2019 — “The world is full of skeptics,” Detour’s Al Roberts struggles to explain, in voice-over, while on-screen we’re pondering Vera’s dead body. “I know. I’m one myself . . .”Even now, closing in on seventy-five years after the Producers Releasing Corporation...

Jun 12, 2017 — Informed by his work in theater and his travels through rural America, Nicholas Ray brought an outsider’s perspective to genre filmmaking in his debut feature.

Oct 7, 2013 — René Clair, Fredric March, and Veronica Lake cast sensational spells in this screwball supernatural treat.

Apr 3, 2013 — A new documentary profile of a great raconteur, titled André Gregory: Before and After Dinner and directed by Cindy Kleine, opens today at New York’s Film Forum. In it, Gregory delves into his past, including his fraught relationship with his...