The Old Guard

Aug 31, 2011 — French sociologist Roger Caillois proposed that every form of human recreation could be placed somewhere on a continuum between two terms: ludus and paidia. The first of these represents games defined almost wholly by their rule systems. Crossword puzzles and...

Dec 11, 2023 — Justine Triet’s film and star Sandra Hüller are also favorites for critics in Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington, D.C.

Sep 11, 2023 — The jury in Venice presented its top awards to Yorgos Lanthimos, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Matteo Garrone, and Agnieszka Holland.

Aug 23, 2022 — With one foot in naturalism and the other in dreams and poetry, Marcel Carné’s visually rousing drama is an ode to the daily vicissitudes of ordinary Parisians.

May 28, 2019 — It has taken me forty years to appreciate the audacity of Agnès Varda in writing and directing One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977). Not only did Varda make her subject the most crucial and vexed issue of the feminist movement, at that...

Jun 24, 2018 — During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.

Aug 3, 2010 — Sanshiro Sugata: A Career Blooms Moviegoers the world over know Akira Kurosawa for Rashomon (1950) and the international classics that followed—Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, High and Low. The filmmaker’s dazzling technique made his genre tales about samurai...

Dec 16, 2025 — Paul Reubens’s iconic character comes to cinematic life in this collaboration with director Tim Burton, who creates an on-screen world that evokes the unbridled joy and overwhelming terror of childhood.

Oct 23, 2024 — Selections from this year’s lineup will screen in New York and Los Angeles.

Mar 19, 2021 — We’ve been watching and reading about films by Cecilia Mangini, Cheryl Dunye, Claire Denis, and Nina Menkes.