Val

Aug 28, 2012 — A frenetic portrait of New York as well as a love story, Paul Fejos’s film captures the odd sensation of being alone in the big city, even when in a crowd.

Jul 31, 2012 — Aki Kaurismäki’s latest working-class fable is his warmest, and his most political.

Jul 24, 2012 — Whit Stillman’s wry comedy about Upper East Siders looked like a perverse bit of daring in 1990; today it seems like an artifact from an earlier century.

Jul 14, 2012 — Simply stated, Wes Anderson is the most original presence in American film comedy since Preston Sturges. He is as boundlessly confident as  Sturges was in his heyday, and he has a similarly keen ear for gaudy dialogue; a gift for...

Jun 12, 2012 — Hal Ashby’s delicately off-kilter May-December romance stars two of the unlikeliest countercultural icons of the seventies.

May 23, 2012 — Iranian master director Abbas Kiarostami voyaged to Italy to make a film that questions love, relationships, and Western art cinema.

May 8, 2012 — To start on a personal note: I wrote a book about La haine that came out in November 2005, just as the Paris suburbs (banlieues) erupted in an unprecedented wave of violence. Every night, as in the Bob Marley song we...

Apr 17, 2012 — Maybe it is something to do with the sensual seductiveness of cinema: as new-millennium Americans, we care nothing for Japa­nese poetry, little for Japanese painting and fiction, and certainly too much for Japanese cartoons, and yet Yasujiro Ozu, the least...

Apr 13, 2012 — Performances Fists in the Pocket, a gasp-inducing, mouth-frothing, black-comic attack on bourgeois values, is remembered first and foremost as a shocking debut from director Marco Bellocchio. But it gave its star, Lou Castel, a memorable entrance of his own: he...

Mar 27, 2012 — Good wartime propaganda films are as rare as good wars. Noël Coward and David Lean’s In Which We Serve, which had its premiere in Great Britain in September 1942, when the nation was entering the fourth year of hostilities with...