The Best of Times

Jul 16, 2013 — Theater legend Peter Brook’s approach to bringing the classic fable about human savagery to the screen was radical in its straightforwardness.

Oct 4, 2011 — No film better illustrates Pier Paolo Pasolini’s challenge to conventional representations, to the social and cultural consensus, than his 1976 masterwork.

Jan 13, 2008 — Certainly one of the wildest, most original, and most instinctive movie stars turned auteurs in the Hollywood annals, Cornel Wilde made procedurals of uncivilized survival, in a visual syntax that ranges from comic-strip splat to outright gut punch.

Jul 9, 2007 — The names Hiroshi Teshigahara, Kobo Abe, and Toru Takemitsu loom large among Japanese intellectuals of the late twentieth century. Each in his own right was an artist of peculiar genius, each resisting easy classification in conventional categories: Teshigahara as filmmaker,...

Jul 9, 2007 — Hiroshi Teshigahara’s late work is a masterful amalgam of high international modernism and traditional Japanese fine arts.

Sep 29, 2026 — With their mix of comedy, ecstasy, and aesthetic strangeness, the French auteur’s first three features grant us access to psychic states that we might not otherwise be able to enter.

Sep 14, 2026 — May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown wins the Golden Lion, and NAZA, codirected by Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, wins a Special Jury Prize.

Aug 27, 2026 — She was a winning presence on the big screen, even if her movies were only a fraction of her monumental impact on popular culture.

Oct 3, 2025 — Among them are the latest from Claire Denis, the return of Daniel Day-Lewis, and a dazzling restoration.

Sep 29, 2025 — Notes on new studies of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick and biographies of Jane Birkin and Terrence Malick.