Difficult Years

Jun 5, 2006 — Painful, beautiful, and discomfiting, Maurice Pialat’s coming-of-age drama remains as startling in its honesty, its unique mix of savagery and delicacy, as it was in 1983.

Sep 26, 2005 — “They were down for each other.” If one wanted to pitch the concept of Bad Timing in six words, this comment by its director, Nicolas Roeg, couldn’t be bettered.

Sep 19, 2005 — Jane Campion is a rarity, not simply because she is a world-class female director, but because she has devoted her career to exploring female subjectivity.

Jun 27, 2005 — Like his earlier adaptations of Terence Rattigan plays, Anthony Asquith’s late work is bereft of heavy-handed directorial flourishes.

May 9, 2005 — This seminal documentary conveys the particular seductiveness and resonance of the dream of going pro for two talented Chicago teenagers.

Apr 25, 2005 — Andrzej Wajda’s first feature film marks the beginning of the Polish School, the paradigm of Polish cinema that arose from the political and cultural thaw of the mid-1950s.

Mar 14, 2005 — A director is naturally a man like everyone else. Yet his life isn’t normal. For us, seeing is a necessity. For a painter, too, the problem is to see. But while the painter has to discover a static reality, or...

Jul 19, 2004 — Marcel Carné's third feature is as epochal as any film made in France in the 1930s, exemplifying the style known as “poetic realism.”

Mar 10, 2003 — Vilgot Sjöman’s cultural-sexual sensation sparked much critical and popular mayhem, only to be consigned to nearly instantaneous oblivion.

Jan 6, 2003 — With its casually comfortable exoticism, abstruse locale, and beautifully sympathetic anti-hero, Julien Duvivier’s film established a narrative paradigm that persists today.