Short Plays

Nov 25, 2015 — Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film about one man’s mortality offers a study in postwar Japan, Kurosawa vs. Ozu, and the realization that knowing how to die requires learning how to be alive.

Nov 12, 2015 — Michael Haneke’s politically prescient drama explores the tenuous, uneasy connections between inhabitants of a globally interwoven Europe.

Oct 15, 2015 — Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni are cast against type—and funnyman director Ettore Scola gets serious—in this humane drama set in Fascist Italy.

Sep 14, 2015 — In his latest column, Peter Cowie reflects on his friendship with our beloved cofounder.

Jul 17, 2015 — As visually and sociopolitically expansive as it is intimate in its details of a boy’s coming of age, Jan Troell’s film is one of the great cinematic debuts.

Jun 29, 2015 — This work of hallucinatory lyricism was one of the final and freest expressions of the rule-flouting New Wave movement in Czechoslovakia.

Jun 17, 2015 — Taking the form of a casual conversation, Louis Malle’s film about transformative experiences is an outgrowth of its writer-stars’ experimental theater days.

Jun 17, 2015 — From a shrewd adaptation by André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, Jonathan Demme fashions a visually inventive dreamscape out of an Ibsen classic.

Jun 4, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder stocked the cast of The Merchant of Four Seasons with friends and colleagues from his experimental theater days.

May 29, 2015 — A shocking chapter of Soviet Czechoslovakian history is dramatized in Costa-Gavras’s controversial follow-up to Z.