The Invitation

Sep 27, 2011 — Internationally, Victor Sjöström is best known for his performance as Professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). But behind that unforgettable face of old age is a younger man, a leading actor who was also the greatest Swedish...

Jun 25, 2007 — Chris Marker’s masterpiece is a cinematic essay and travel film made up of asides and digressions that form a portrait of late twentieth-century civilization.

May 9, 2005 — Les Blank’s documentary examines the interaction of premodern tribal existence with European modernity, epitomized by a movie narrative about the invidious clash of brute nature and a singular ego bent on his own mission of cultural enlightenment.

Jun 11, 2024 — A radically strange, postmodern adaptation of a novel by Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film is grounded by a sweaty, seething, meaty eroticism—a confrontational sexuality that remains bracing.

Nov 25, 2020 — “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a fatal abyss.” Wanda in The White Sheik (1952) I have a vivid memory from the first film-studies class I enrolled in, a class on Italian neorealism, where the weekly...

Sep 28, 2010 — “The past, again and again.” —Major Jack Celliers, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence Nagisa Oshima’s filmmaking career began with the risen sun—or rather, with the promise of a sun soon to rise: Tomorrow’s Sun (1959), a dizzyingly designed faux “coming attraction”...

Jan 24, 2018 — One of the most memorable sequences in the silent classic People on Sunday explores the experience of being photographed and the tension between still and moving images.

Sep 27, 2016 — This monumental meditation on the Ten Commandments captures the spiritual undercurrents of life in late-Communist Poland.

Jun 24, 2014 — In 1964, Richard Lester harnessed the Beatles’ exploding superstardom for a giddy day-in-the-life pop masterpiece.

Sep 22, 2021 — Wes Anderson collects his favorite New Yorker stories, and Werner Herzog has written his first novel.