The Old Guard

Sep 21, 2016 — An exhilarating blend of noir and splatter-flick tropes, the Coen brothers’ debut feature established their unique brand of cosmic fatalism.

Sep 29, 2015 — Merchant Ivory Productions’ sun-kissed romantic comedy is an effervescent tale of class and manners among the Edwardian English.

Mar 4, 2014 — The great documentarian Claude Lanzmann’s new movie, made from footage he didn’t use in Shoah, provides a fascinating glipse at the way he began that monumental project.

Dec 1, 2009 — The first words we hear are Sam Cutler’s: “Everybody seems to be ready—are we ready?” We were nowhere near ready for what was to come, there at the bitter end of the sixties. I remember that rainy day so well,...

Jul 19, 2004 — Marcel Carné's third feature is as epochal as any film made in France in the 1930s, exemplifying the style known as “poetic realism.”

Nov 9, 2009 — The following essay, written in October 1987, after the release of Wings of Desire, originally appeared in The Logic of Images, a collection of Wim Wenders’s writing that was published in 1992. In the last few years, since Paris, Texas, Berlin...

Jun 22, 2009 — So much critical ink has been shed over Last Year at Marienbad that one might wonder if the flood of commentary, once receded, would take the film along with it. Alain Resnais’ second feature has been lavishly praised and royally...

Apr 17, 2024 — Three of this month’s programs blast back to the turbulent midcentury moment when old Hollywood gave way to something new.

Dec 13, 2022 — A pioneering feminist artist drawn to universal themes, the Swedish director mined the complexity and humor of human behavior in films that courted controversy and cultivated a sense of detachment.

Jun 7, 2019 — He is the most disarming and self-effacing of the English actors who dominated stage and screen in the middle of the twentieth century—the others were John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, and Laurence Olivier. Those fellows carried themselves like grand...