Death on the Run

Sep 15, 2009 — Words are the trained fleas in David Mamet’s sidewalk circus—dirty words, often bloodstained, usually swarming, that perform their acrobatic stunts for gawkers who will likely get their pockets picked. That’s the reputation, anyhow. More than thirty years after he made...

May 20, 2009 — The title alone screams incongruity. Shohei Imamura’s 1961 black-and-white caper movie Pigs and Battleships bursts with the confusion and exuberance of a cross-cultural encounter. In its lively portrayal of enthusiastic Japanese locals welcoming the U.S. Navy on R&R to the...

Jun 16, 2008 — Decades later, we’ve come to understand that Claude Sautet’s film—in a less gaudy and obvious, more secretive, insidious way—was just as revolutionary as Breathless.

Sep 13, 2004 — This oblique strategy can be seen as a self-referential characterization of Slacker itself: it appears to have no struc­ture, to be chaotic (a matter of random encounters), when, in fact, it has a very subtle, extremely well-crafted structure that makes...

Apr 24, 2000 — When I make a film, it is a sleep in which I am dreaming. Only the people and places of the dream matter. I have difficulty making contact with others, as one does when half-asleep. If a person is asleep...

Apr 17, 2025 — At eighty-two, the director has made his most deeply personal film yet.

Mar 4, 2025 — The Melbourne Cinémathèque presents selections from the four phases of a profoundly influential oeuvre.

Mar 14, 2018 — We begin with news from the two big festivals of April. SFFILM has now completed the lineup of for this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, running from April 4 through 17 in theaters throughout the Bay Area. 183 films...

Jul 26, 2019 — The late Iranian master takes the spotlight in a magisterial retrospective—the most comprehensive survey of his career ever mounted—opening today at New York’s IFC Center.

Jun 18, 2019 — In his idiosyncratic, award-winning second film, Bruno Dumont uses the story of an alienated police detective to investigate the most elemental aspects of human experience.