A Misfortune

Oct 4, 2011 — Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work demonstrates an aversion for the present while simultaneously suggesting the impossibility of escaping it, and thus the need to confront it.

Jun 21, 2011 — Chains: Bound for Glory Film history is replete with artists embraced by critics but misunderstood by the public. For Italian filmmaker Raffaello Matarazzo, it was the opposite. After working for almost two decades as a midlevel studio director of pictures...

Nov 8, 2010 — To say that Lars von Trier deals in provocation and controversy is like saying John Ford made westerns: obviously true, but far from giving a measure of the director’s importance. Ever since The Element of Crime polarized critics at Cannes...

Sep 15, 2009 — Words are the trained fleas in David Mamet’s sidewalk circus—dirty words, often bloodstained, usually swarming, that perform their acrobatic stunts for gawkers who will likely get their pockets picked. That’s the reputation, anyhow. More than thirty years after he made...

Nov 19, 2007 — In 2003, on the occasion of the Cinémathèque française’s complete retrospective of Ingmar Bergman’s work, ten filmmakers were invited to present one of his films that had a significant effect on them. Controversial French director Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl) selected...

Jan 11, 1999 — It was quite a surprise to learn that David Lean had not read Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations before he embarked on his film version in 1945. The closeness of the adaptation, the understanding of the characters, make one swear it...

Nov 19, 1992 — In Hieronymous Karl Friedrich, Baron von Munchausen, the greatest liar in history outside of politics, director Terry Gilliam has found perhaps his closest fictional counterpart.

Dec 9, 1991 — We used as much of the actual detail of physical things and of technique as we could possibly cram in, and as many players reflecting the endless variety of character and emotion of the real men as dramatization would allow.

Feb 23, 2017 — Pedro Almodóvar’s Oscar-nominated breakthrough revels in the complexities of the female psyche.

Jun 24, 2025 — The product of a famously tumultuous production, William Friedkin’s nerve-jangling adaptation of the classic suspense novel The Wages of Fear infuses the mechanics of genre with rough-hewn realism and the New Hollywood’s renegade spirit.