The Idiot

Mar 30, 2021 — Mike Leigh’s midcareer masterpiece is one of the finest examples of his ability to construct riveting drama from ordinary life.

Dec 3, 2019 — As the title card comes up, the movie has already begun, with a frontal view of a dilapidated plantation house, its ivied columns sporadically lit up by a raging storm. Spectators at the time of the film’s release who were...

May 19, 2015 — Charlie Chaplin’s intensely emotional drama is a dream film about show business, history, and death.

Aug 14, 2012 — The camera never stops moving in the Dardenne brothers’ portrait of a troubled teenage girl desperate for a job.

Dec 3, 2008 — Gliding on silvery reels of steel, and tricked out with Lars von Trier’s panoply of visual effects, the film ravishes with its elaborately storyboarded tunnel vision.

Nov 8, 2010 — To say that Lars von Trier deals in provocation and controversy is like saying John Ford made westerns: obviously true, but far from giving a measure of the director’s importance. Ever since The Element of Crime polarized critics at Cannes...

Jun 13, 2005 — Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. The film’s steady accumulation of incident,...

Jun 16, 2020 — As studios delay the releases of their big summer movies, critics come down hard on the Academy for postponing the Oscars.

Oct 4, 2011 — Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work demonstrates an aversion for the present while simultaneously suggesting the impossibility of escaping it, and thus the need to confront it.

May 25, 2017 — “The act of seeing has a special meaning in Japanese director Naomi Kawase’s Radiance, in which the job of character Misako (Ayame Misaki) is to write the scripts for the audio-assist provided for blind patrons at the movies,” writes Barbara...