† From Now On

Mar 16, 2007 — The first of his films to be shown outside Japan, Ichikawa Kon’s twenty-seventh feature dramatically raised the director’s profile.

Dec 4, 2006 — William Greaves’s masterpiece uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary.

Jun 19, 2006 — This essay originally appeared in the fanzine PHOTON (issue #22), in 1972. Stop-motion animation has been attracting a growing number of enthusiasts for about the last ten years, and though it seems the majority of these people must out of...

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

Sep 29, 2003 — Fassbinder had long dreamed of a “German Hollywood film.” He sought not only success with the audience, but also professionalism. The auteur film in its purest form is an attempt to abolish the division of labor: the filmmaker represents in...

Aug 18, 2003 — Ingmar Bergman’s chamber film is his most concentrated inquiry into the significance of religion, and of Lutheranism specifically.

May 26, 2003 — Transcription of a speech given by long-time Derek Jarman collaborator and friend, actress Tilda Swinton

Mar 24, 2003 — Straw Dogs turns on a woman’s rape, and one can’t blame pictures for depicting. But the film shows the woman, after some tart resistance, seeming to enjoy it, and this approaches the apex of what a delicate soul might call...

Feb 14, 2002 — Robert Bresson’s second feature is fixed in history as one of the movies that heralded an austere, modernistic way of seeing and feeling.

Oct 15, 2050 — Voice-over narration has existed since the beginnings of cinema and has been an integral part of some of the great masterworks of narrative film, from The Magnificent Ambersons to Double Indemnity to Jules and Jim to Taxi Driver. It spans...