The Dark Heaven

Jul 21, 2008 — Akira Kurosawa’s modern adaptation of an American thriller represents a departure from his usual themes and stylistic choices.

Jun 21, 1999 — Laurence Olivier’s Henry V today seems like nothing less than a miracle in answer to the Chorus’s call for “a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.” It’s a dazzling adaptation of a Shakespeare play, made...

Mar 27, 2020 — Following a briefing on the crisis, we turn to a few items that might help us take our minds off it.

Jun 20, 2017 — “Bertrand Tavernier joins a growing list of filmmakers who've made what amounts to an epic video essay with My Journey Through French Cinema, a three-hour-plus leap into notable French filmmaking from roughly 1930 to 1980,” writes Clayton Dillard at Slant....

Dec 16, 2016 — Did You See This? To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, Adam Scovell visited the film’s unforgettable London locations. Another masterpiece made half a century ago is Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl, a scathing critique of racism anchored by...

Aug 27, 2013 — Ernst Lubitsch’s World War II–era high-wire act is a profound take on the absurdity cruelty of civilization and a perfect black comedy to boot.

Feb 11, 2008 — Though today he is most fondly remembered for his later romantic comedies, typifying Hollywood filmmaking in its heyday, it should be known that Ernst Lubitsch was also a pioneer of the modern movie musical.

Sep 28, 2022 — Uday Shankar’s fantastical dance epic embodies a progressive, postcolonial Indian aesthetic that is decades ahead of its time.

Feb 11, 2015 — With its provocative ambiguities, tender compassion, and fragmented editing style, this supernatural classic is a pure dose of Nicolas Roeg.

Jul 12, 2011 — Naked is the angriest, most bitterly critical attack on the false values of society that Mike Leigh, Britain’s constant chronicler of the tragic comedy of desperate lives, has ever made. Its audacity is that the attack is mounted through a...