'night, Mother

Sep 29, 2008 — After Ozu died on his sixtieth birthday, December 12, 1963, some thirty-two diaries were discovered. They were from 1933 to 1963, and though a few years were missing, they offer a commentary on the life of the director and reveal...

Sep 22, 2008 — With their rotating casts of sourpuss Finns and their stringent compositions, Aki Kaurismäki’s films would seem the least likely candidates for laughs, yet his black-comic precision has made him one of the most warmly embraced filmmakers on the international art-house...

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...

Jul 21, 2008 — A dreamy alternative to the standard notion of horror, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s phantasmal film reimagined the figure of the vampire.

Jul 21, 2008 — Carl Theodor Dreyer’s elliptical and dreamlike vampire film defies definitive shots at interpretation.

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...

May 12, 2008 — Today it may be hard to understand the shock waves that Louis Malle’s romantic drama created with its “frank” depiction of a woman’s sexual pleasure, but in the context of late-1950s France, it was a bombshell.

Jan 21, 2008 — As late as 1970, Alf Sjöberg’s boldly experimental 1951 adaptation of August Strindberg’s play was declared as inaugurating “a new cinematic language.”

Nov 19, 2007 — Ingmar Bergman made some outstanding films before Sawdust and Tinsel (1953). But that film, released in America under the meretricious title The Naked Night—and known in Sweden as The Clown’s Evening—was the first that no other director could have made....

Sep 17, 2007 — G. W. Pabst’s adaptation of the play by Bertolt Brecht transforms the original without betraying it, softening its cynicism with humanity and integrating elements of psychoanalysis.