We Are the Night

Jun 1, 2016 — The Moviegoer, a biweekly online column published by the Library of America, has been a locus of terrific writing about classic literature-inspired films since it launched in February. Curated by film critic Michael Sragow, the column features a roster of...

Aug 12, 2015 — Director Karel Reisz and writer Harold Pinter’s brilliant adaptation of John Fowles’s novel focuses on the experiences of women in two radically different eras.

Oct 20, 2008 — Costa-Gavras’s film pointedly raised issues that for many people were only dimly in the air at the time, and which have become more and more unavoidable in recent years, as the United States has openly assumed its imperial role.

Jun 23, 2008 — The year 1950 marked a turning point in Anthony Mann’s career, the moment when he passed from the series of brilliant film-noir B movies that had established him to the westerns that made him a major figure. Mann released three...

Mar 17, 2008 — In its portrayal of the long international arm of crime families, Alberto Lattuada’s ingenious comedy offers a prescient look at globalization.

Sep 3, 2007 — Aconversation, a misunderstanding. The basic pattern in many of Jim Jarmusch’s films is two characters, sometimes three, bound together by chance and wandering along toward an ill-defined goal, each trying all the while to get to know the other or...

Feb 12, 2007 — In this classical whodunit made just after the close of World War II, swirling sexual frustrations and resentments find expression in a series of apparently motiveless murders.

Aug 22, 2005 — Featuring a brilliant, idiosyncratic performance by Michel Simon, Jean Renoir’s early comedy is a commendation of loitering as the antidote to efficiency and perfection.

May 27, 2026 — When Joachim Trier made his debut in 2006 with the film Reprise, I felt as if a veil had been lifted. There was nothing wrong with Norwegian cinema before Trier’s arrival, but it always seemed to be about someone else,...

Feb 18, 2025 — In her mainstream breakthrough, director Joan Micklin Silver envisions New York City through the eyes of a complicated, searching woman trying to figure out her place in the world.