Youth

This Japanese visionary played chaos like jazz in his movies, which included anything-goes yakuza thrillers and daring postwar dramas of human frailty.

May 20, 2010 — Driven to Destruction Nagisa Oshima was a destructive force in Japanese cinema—and he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Intent on exploding taboos and jabbing the eye of the status quo, he created films that leave us with a...

May 19, 2010 — Plenty of ink has been expended over the years on the turbulent friendship between Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, which helped define the French New Wave in the 1960s. Now those stories jump off the page and onto the screen...

May 18, 2010 — Nicolas Roeg’s first solo outing as a director is an astonishing visual poem, by turns violent, innocent, and elegiac.

Apr 28, 2010 — Just over halfway through Ang Lee’s masterful Civil War drama Ride with the Devil, the small group of men at the story’s center, young, Southern-sympathizing Bushwhackers fighting in divided Missouri, meet up with other ragtag bands of rebels. Coalescing under...

Apr 26, 2010 — In the late 1940s, driven by the opening-night ovations for A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams embarked on more than a decade of immense success. During this period, he wrote at a furious pace: Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo,...

Apr 20, 2010 — In 1992, I went to Paris to see some movies that weren’t turning up on these shores, at least not as quickly as I wanted them to. At the time, it meant something particular to be going to Paris to...

A leading figure of the Japanese New Wave, this radical filmmaker tackled taboos and politically charged subjects with stylistic flair and striking symbolism.

Mar 17, 2010 — 1. A Park—Night A man aflame is running directly toward camera. This image, which comes from Nicholas Ray’s initial treatment for Rebel Without a Cause, might stand at the head of almost any of Ray’s movies, since it so clearly...

Feb 9, 2010 — You can’t keep a good woman, or a great movie about a good woman, down. By all accounts, goodness in the real Lola Montez reflected the vagaries of character, not talent. She was, as Cosmo Brown says of Lina Lamont...