His Night Out

Apr 20, 2010 — In 1992, I went to Paris to see some movies that weren’t turning up on these shores, at least not as quickly as I wanted them to. At the time, it meant something particular to be going to Paris to...

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...

May 5, 2009 — Every second of David Fincher’s uncanny drama—every shot and every cut, every gesture and every facial expression, every turn in its narrative and every visual effect—is devoted to the contemplation of time’s passing.

Dec 21, 2008 — In 1962, Roberto Rossellini called a press conference in a bookshop in Rome and announced that the cinema was dead. “There’s a crisis not just in film but culture as a whole,” he explained. Increasingly, Rossellini had understood the great...

Jan 21, 2008 — Lindsay Anderson’s adaptation of David Storey’s novel is a clenched fist of a movie that follows a professional Rugby League player who instinctively channels feeling through physical aggression.

Sep 17, 2007 — G. W. Pabst’s adaptation of the play by Bertolt Brecht transforms the original without betraying it, softening its cynicism with humanity and integrating elements of psychoanalysis.

May 21, 2007 — In January 1948, British film producer Sir Alexander Korda, head of British-Lion and London Film Productions, commissioned novelist Graham Greene to write and research “an original postwar continental story to be based on either or both of the following territories:...

May 7, 2001 — test

Sep 18, 2000 — Drenched in mud and rain, Lars von Trier’s breakthrough film inhabits a true twilight zone, bereft of heroes and integrity.

Nov 8, 1999 — In The Third Man—probably the greatest British thriller of the postwar era—director Carol Reed and screenwriter Graham Greene set a fable of moral corruption in a world of near-Byzantine visual complexity: the streets and ruins of occupied Vienna. It is...