Hands of a Stranger

Aug 18, 2003 — The two versions of Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist romance offer case studies in Hollywood and European sensibilities as they existed in the early 1950s.

Feb 24, 2026 — For this existential noir, Joel and Ethan Coen drew inspiration from crime-fiction master James M. Cain’s lean, hard-boiled style and interest in the quotidian world of work.

Dec 12, 2025 — This week: Bi Gan, Radu Jude, a new Film Quarterly, and of course, more year-end lists and polls.

Sep 24, 2025 — Jacques Audiard’s Paris-set drama about small-time hoodlum with musical ambitions crystallized his identity as an artist with a high degree of confidence and control.

Feb 25, 2025 — Like many of the characters found throughout the director’s oeuvre, the alternative-press staffers at the center of her sophomore feature are bound up in a perpetual tug-of-war between past and present realities.

Jan 13, 2016 — In Bitter Rice, Giuseppe De Santis focused his lens on the world of Italy’s female rice workers, for a story that’s part social commentary, part pulp melodrama—and introduced the world to a dazzling young actress named Silvana Mangano.

Apr 23, 2013 — Who is Pierre Etaix and where has he been all your life? This is the story of a filmmaker who was vanished, banished, skipped over. It’s as if one of those invisible cubicles mimes are always getting themselves shut in...

Apr 25, 2012 — Pearls of the Deep: Alumni AssociationIn the mid-1960s, there was a brief window during which a remarkable cinema of ideas and visual experimentation flourished in Communist Czechoslovakia. This fecund period lasted approximately five years, from 1963 to 1968, when it...

Dec 10, 2024 — In this brilliant adaptation, Joel and Ethan Coen find a kindred spirit in novelist Cormac McCarthy, whose abiding themes—including destiny, the American West, and the contest between our better natures and our survival instinct—mirror their own.

Aug 13, 2024 — In films that elude categorization, the Ukrainian director developed a boldly experimental aesthetic that evokes her mercurial inner dialogue and the leaps and stutters of her imagination.