The Human Experience

Oct 5, 2017 — One of Kenji Mizoguchi’s greatest films screens at the New York Film Festival this weekend in a gorgeous new restoration.

Oct 4, 2012 — Louis Malle is remembered primarily as a fiction filmmaker, but he had a parallel career as a documentarian. In fact, he got his start in nonfiction: when he was just twenty-three years old, Malle was given the opportunity to collaborate...

Sep 26, 2010 — The Thin Red Line, arguably the greatest war film ever made, ended two decades of silence from Terrence Malick, cinema’s wandering auteur. The silence wasn’t entirely self-imposed, since during this time he tried to launch a few productions—including a tale...

Jul 31, 2018 — The award-winning director of The Rider explores the deep respect for nature and subjective human experience in Terrence Malick’s masterful vision of early seventeenth-century America.

Mar 30, 2015 — The astonishing intimacy and scope of this remarkable, aesthetically captivating epic ushered in a new era of narrative documentary filmmaking.

Aug 16, 2011 — “It is my best film. I always loved it. I always believed in it. It is real cinema, done for cinema—like art for art.” That was Roman Polanski’s view of Cul-de-sac in 1970, four years after its release and just...

Sep 4, 2020 — Tilda Swinton stars in a free adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s 1930 play.

May 31, 2017 — Long difficult to see, this transgressive silent masterpiece draws on a wide range of aesthetic influences to push against the boundaries of film form.

Feb 22, 2022 — Acting, that undefinable amalgam of technique, persona, and plain hard work, dominates this month’s roundup.

Nov 2, 2009 — The following, written in 1986, is from the first treatment for Wings of Desire. And we, spectators always, everywhere,looking at, never out of, everything!—Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy” At first it’s not possible to describe anything beyond a wish or a...