A Real Pain

Apr 27, 2017 — 1. As I began work on The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew and Associates, I knew that 1960’s Primary was really the birth of what we think of as the modern documentary: observational photography based on access to an interesting subject, presenting...

Jan 13, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s characters play an endlessly layered game of dress-up in this tale of sadomasochistic love.

Feb 4, 2014 — When François Truffaut was a twenty-three-year-old film critic, in 1955, he read an autobiographical first novel by a seventy-four-year-old writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. “The book overwhelmed me,” he later recalled, “and I wrote: If I ever succeed in making films, I...

Dec 25, 2008 — Robert Rossellini’s efforts to put history into images would yield some forty-two hours of “didactic” movies, mostly for television.

Dec 5, 2005 — René Clément’s masterpiece is dedicated to the radical Freudian proposal that living matter seeks the comfort of oblivion.

Jul 21, 1998 — Despite its title, Samurai II, Duel at Ichijoji Temple, is not really an action film. It has more than its share of action and violence, to be sure—the duel between Musashi Miyamoto (Toshiro Mifune) and the chain-and-sickle master that opens...

Oct 12, 1987 — For more than forty years, The Seventh Seal has been a benchmark by which all other great foreign films are judged. It launched the international career of its director, Ingmar Bergman, and made a star of its 27-year-old leading actor,...

Nov 16, 2021 — Tsui Hark’s epic martial-arts saga revolutionized Hong Kong cinema by presenting a complex portrait of modern Chinese history and setting a gold standard in action choreography.

Dec 9, 2002 — What makes Jean-Luc Godard’s classic so unique a viewing experience today, even more than in 1963, is the way it stimulates an audience’s intelligence as well as its senses.

Sep 4, 2025 — The long-awaited passion project is celebrated in a new book, a documentary, and a retrospective.