Film

Jul 26, 2011 — To a secular eye, Jean-Pierre Melville’s sixth feature film, Léon Morin, Priest (1961), is about almost anything except religion: the deleterious effects of sexual repression, the moral bleariness of wartime and life under occupation, the harsh inflections of history in...

Jul 25, 2011 — A fearless tragicomedy about hope, dread, longing, and forgiveness, Life During Wartime (2010) is Todd Solondz’s boldest and most haunting movie to date, carrying his exploration of Middle American malaise into new territory. As before, he probes the dreams, dissatisfactions,...

Jul 21, 2011 — Performances When people talk about Mike Leigh’s Naked, the conversation is inevitably focused on David Thewlis’s nerve-shredding, tour de force central performance as the callous drifter Johnny, who slices through life like a straight razor. Yet consider how impossible his...

Jul 20, 2011 — Wes Anderson’s vision of New York City in The Royal Tenenbaums may be a storybook one, but, as a new short video on the A.V. Club proves, it’s all based on reality. The entertaining three-and-a-half-minute piece—made as part of the...

Jul 19, 2011 — In May 1956, an Indian film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. It wasn’t well attended. The Indian delegation had done little to promote it, arranging only a single midnight screening that clashed with a party in honor of...

Jul 18, 2011 — Out of the extravagant variety of Jean Cocteau’s work—the paintings and drawings, the poems, the plays and novels and memoirs, the opera librettos and ballet scenarios—it is likely his films that will have the most enduring influence, and among those,...

Jul 15, 2011 — Cinephiles, man your battle stations: Abel Gance’s legendary silent behemoth Napoleon, which hasn’t been shown theatrically in the U.S. with live accompaniment for nearly thirty years, will be presented by the 2012 San Francisco Silent Film Festival in four special...

Jul 12, 2011 — Naked is the angriest, most bitterly critical attack on the false values of society that Mike Leigh, Britain’s constant chronicler of the tragic comedy of desperate lives, has ever made. Its audacity is that the attack is mounted through a...

Jul 12, 2011 — Heeeere’s Johnny, the desperate, destructive prophet-of-the-apocalypse protagonist of Mike Leigh’s brilliantly corrosive Naked (1993), a sexually explicit update to a long line of British films, plays, and novels about angry young men. Johnny might be mistaken for a mere misanthrope,...

Jul 8, 2011 — Marcel Carné’s rich backstage drama about the theater world of nineteenth-century Paris, Children of Paradise, is back—in a new form. Based on Jacques Prevert’s original scenario, a ballet version of the classic film, choreographed by José Carlos Martinez and scored...