The Descent

Feb 24, 2018 — Starting yesterday, and on through Wednesday, Anthology Film Archives in New York is presenting a series curated by Steve Erickson, Documentary, Iranian Style: The Films of Mehrdad Oskouei. “It’s about as essential a film series as I can imagine,” writes...

Jan 24, 2018 — The forty-seventh edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam opens today and runs through February 4. Over a month ago now, we started tracking the lineup, which the IFFR unveiled bit by bit every few days, culminating with the publication...

May 22, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so common that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. But when this action appears in a movie, it is revealed as more than the original mode...

Aug 31, 2011 — Let there be no trouble, no pranks . . . Do you realize the enormity of our moral responsibility? —Headmaster in Zéro de conduite There is nothing in the history of movies that mirrors or matches the achievement of Jean...

Nov 19, 1990 — By facing death, Akira Kurosawa fashions an affirmation of life, characteristically clear-headed in its exploration of man’s fate.

Jan 10, 2019 — Repertory Picks Tomorrow evening at 7, as one of the courses in its Dastardly Dinners series, the Indiana University Cinema will give moviegoers a chance to feast their eyes on Luis Buñuel’s 1962 The Exterminating Angel. One of the handful...

May 18, 2018 — The young Chinese director transports critics to a state of “melancholic bliss.”

Nov 13, 2025 — The director of Rat Trap and Monologue was an uncompromising artist who helped establish the Indian state of Kerala as a hub of bold political filmmaking.

Jan 16, 2024 — Drawing on the influence of a wide range of genres, John Sayles creates a densely layered narrative that unfolds across two timelines and explores the long-hidden secrets of a small border town in Texas.

Jan 10, 2020 — How many times, in cultural history, has surrealism been declared out for the count? For the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing in 1929, surveying the surrealist literature of André Breton, Robert Desnos, and Louis Aragon, the glory days of this...