Past Performance

Mar 22, 2018 — Composer Richard Einhorn talks about conceiving the oratorio Voices of Light, which has often accompanied Carl Theodor Dreyer’s he Passion of Joan of Arc over the past quarter century.

Sep 13, 2016 — Kenji Mizoguchi achieved the sublime with this structurally complex portrait of artistic ambition and female subjugation.

May 26, 2016 — During the conductor and composer’s visit—a day after he’d led the New York Philharmonic in a live orchestral performance of the score to City Lights—we talked about his love for early cinema, the delicate process of restoring Chaplin’s music, and...

Nov 17, 2015 — Max von Sydow has spent the past six decades cultivating one of cinema’s most illustrious careers, and now, at eighty-seven, the Swedish actor “may be on the verge of becoming a pop-culture icon,” writes Terrence Rafferty in the Atlantic.

Oct 21, 2015 — Masaki Kobayashi takes on broken vows and the unreality of the past in his sensual and spooky four-part adaptation of Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese folktales.

May 29, 2012 — A watershed film in Bergman’s career, this tale of a woman caught between the past and present is a masterful study in darkness and light.

Aug 11, 2008 — Every Guy Maddin movie creates the illusion of a secret history. His willfully primitive cut-rate spectacles seem like artifacts, reanimated bits of cultural detritus, but also like hauntings, the return of the cinematic repressed. From the start, Maddin’s sensibility was...

Aug 22, 2005 — Featuring a brilliant, idiosyncratic performance by Michel Simon, Jean Renoir’s early comedy is a commendation of loitering as the antidote to efficiency and perfection.

Jun 21, 2004 — Indefatigably productive, ingenious, exasperating, narcissistically didactic, slyly self-promoting, abject, generous, exploitative, devoted to the wretched of the earth with honest fervor and deluded romanticism: Pier Paolo Pasolini can easily exhaust the adjective-prone, as man and artist, his person and his...

Apr 28, 2003 — The sense of the difficulty of a real assumption of adulthood gives François Truffaut’s final Antoine Doinel film an undercurrent of anguish, despite its surface lightness.