Empire of Passion

Sep 24, 2015 — Bruce Beresford critiques the British colonialist era in this precise, layered adaptation of a 1939 novel by Joyce Cary.

May 12, 2008 — Today it may be hard to understand the shock waves that Louis Malle’s romantic drama created with its “frank” depiction of a woman’s sexual pleasure, but in the context of late-1950s France, it was a bombshell.

Dec 12, 2017 — “Evil is ascendant,” begins Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “The Resistance—an intrepid, multi-everything group whose leaders include a battle-tested woman warrior—has been fighting the good fight for years but is outnumbered and occasionally outmaneuvered. Yes, the latest Star...

Aug 3, 2020 — The first European box-office success of the movement dubbed the New German Cinema, Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s 1975 The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum took on a hot-button issue: the paranoia provoked by homegrown terrorism and the opportunity that...

Dec 12, 2013 — A beloved filmmaker in India, the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak digs into his region’s traumatic history in this epic melodrama.

Apr 10, 2018 — In the run-up to the release of Zama on Friday, the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York is presenting a retrospective of work by Lucrecia Martel. Starting tonight and on through Friday, Martel will be there to either...

Feb 20, 2017 — Joan Crawford delivers one of her greatest performances in Michael Curtiz’s unsparing look at class, ambition, and the all-consuming intensity of maternal love.

May 31, 2016 — With Alice in the Cites, Wim Wenders created one of the most nuanced and complex portraits of an empowered young girl ever seen on-screen.

Jul 19, 2010 — “It is the most erotic film that I have ever made,” wrote Michael Powell of Black Narcissus. “It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image, from the beginning to the end.”

Nov 7, 2017 — “Many aspects of time, from the dry precision of date and hour to the flights of remembrance and regret, are distilled in a single scene from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943),” writes...