The Ugly

May 20, 2009 — The title alone screams incongruity. Shohei Imamura’s 1961 black-and-white caper movie Pigs and Battleships bursts with the confusion and exuberance of a cross-cultural encounter. In its lively portrayal of enthusiastic Japanese locals welcoming the U.S. Navy on R&R to the...

Nov 27, 2008 — A genuine cause célèbre, adapted from Romain Gary’s 1970 nonfiction novel, Samuel Fuller’s late work is an unusually blunt and suggestively metaphoric account of American racism.

Sep 12, 2007 — Here’s a Criterion discussion that won’t die. It has to do with Berlin Alexanderplatz, and it came up again this week, thanks to a couple of customers writing in. We were standing there in a clump outside our production manager’s...

Aug 28, 2006 — Pietro Germi’s brilliant satire skewers Italian society’s devotion to appearances and its cultlike obsession with gossip and honor.

Nov 22, 1999 — Breathtaking, fastmoving, and overflowing with a delightfully self-mocking sense of humor, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is one of the most popular and influential Japanese films ever made. Released in 1954, this rip-snorting action-adventure epic about a sixteenth-century farm community led...

Nov 26, 2018 — Even as he chronicles the downfall of an American family, Orson Welles brings a sense of buoyancy to this grim saga through his virtuoso storytelling.

Jan 21, 2025 — In his first Hollywood film, British director Stephen Frears dives into the nihilistic world of Jim Thompson’s fiction, delivering an adaptation profoundly attuned to the novelist’s sense of ineluctable suffering.

Oct 24, 2019 — The nominations are out for the Gotham Awards, the IDA Documentary Awards, and the AACTAs.

Jun 5, 2017 — Known for playing sexy noir toughs, Ralph Meeker underwent a startling transformation as the anguished, slovenly male lead in Jack Garfein’s psychological drama.

Oct 22, 2013 — This delicately creepy Hollywood horror movie lives up to its reputation as a classic of the genre.