The Theme

May 23, 2024 — At a time of crisis for Argentinian cinema, an Argentinian director has won the top prize.

May 8, 2020 — The opening and closing credits in a film are a form of housekeeping, fulfilling a legal obligation to compile the names of cast and crew who made the final product possible. Visionary designer Saul Bass saw the aesthetic potential in...

Nov 26, 2019 — A smart and lively adaptation of a 150-year-old classic is warmly greeted in the first round of reviews.

Sep 9, 2018 — Under the Influence Whether he’s exploring the dynamics of a family in crisis or putting his own spin on the body horror genre, Norwegian director Joachim Trier always returns to the subjective experience of time and memory as a central...

Jul 21, 2016 — Interweaving wartime footage with haunting images of abandoned concentration camps, Alain Resnais’s breakthrough was one of the first films to confront the ravages of the Holocaust.

May 17, 2016 — Juxtaposing a vision of a stark, primitive existence on a remote Japanese island with that country’s vast twentieth-century modernization, Kaneto Shindo reveals Japan’s postwar paradoxes and makes a case for its essential, immutable character.

Jul 19, 2010 — “It is the most erotic film that I have ever made,” wrote Michael Powell of Black Narcissus. “It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image, from the beginning to the end.”

Aug 11, 2008 — Every Guy Maddin movie creates the illusion of a secret history. His willfully primitive cut-rate spectacles seem like artifacts, reanimated bits of cultural detritus, but also like hauntings, the return of the cinematic repressed. From the start, Maddin’s sensibility was...

Aug 23, 2004 — This drama about young dreamers is the first definitive plunge into many of Federico Fellini’s dominant thematic and imagistic preoccupations.

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.