The Express

Sep 1, 2016 — Balancing epic scale with lyrical intimacy, Orson Welles inflects the spirit of Shakespeare’s history plays with his own zest for cinematic invention.

May 10, 2016 — Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place imbues the conventions of film noir with a subtle, tense vulnerability that lends a naturalistic weight to the film’s powerful emotional impact.

May 29, 2015 — A shocking chapter of Soviet Czechoslovakian history is dramatized in Costa-Gavras’s controversial follow-up to Z.

Sep 2, 2014 — The following is excerpted from the book-length study Terence Davies, out September 8. See the bottom of the post for a clip of the scene it describes. Excerpt copyright 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois...

Jul 21, 2014 — Anouk Aimée’s beguiling chanteuse, the title character of Jacques Demy’s romantic debut feature, is the figure from whom the director’s entire cinematic world springs.

Jun 20, 2014 — Peter Weir’s sun-dappled, sexually charged nightmare about a disappearance in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australia still unnerves due to its radical lack of resolution.

Mar 4, 2014 — The great documentarian Claude Lanzmann’s new movie, made from footage he didn’t use in Shoah, provides a fascinating glipse at the way he began that monumental project.

Dec 3, 2013 — This scathing drama about a toxic society established Elio Petri as an important director of popular political entertainment in Italy.

Jun 19, 2013 — Disorienting, brutal, and bloody beautiful, František Vláčil’s epic is a dark medieval vision teeming with cinematic invention.

Oct 16, 2012 — After breaking out with Maria Full of Grace, filmmaker Joshua Marston visited a strange new land with persistent and deadly traditions.