Life Is Life

May 13, 2002 — In Barbet Schroeder’s portrait of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, we watch a seemingly amiable, thoroughly pompous despot attempt to transform himself into a figure of heroic proportions.

Sep 5, 1988 — A wild mixture of gangster thriller, slapstick comedy, and bittersweet romance, François Truffaut’s second film was one of the signal works of the French New Wave.

Dec 6, 1987 — Mike Nichols’s treatment of a young man’s initiation into the mysteries of sex at the hands of an older married woman has become a model for this common fantasy.

Sep 13, 2011 — Hollywood has been importing talented European filmmakers at least since the early twenties, when Victor Sjöström and Ernst Lubitsch heeded the siren wail of Tinseltown resources, and their work there has tended to quickly obscure the cultural memory of the...

Jul 18, 2018 — Alan Rudolph is a pioneer in the American independent film movement. He has directed nineteen narrative features and one feature-length documentary. His films have been presented in major international festivals for forty years and are noted for their fluid style,...

Feb 11, 2002 — The phenomenon of old age wherein childhood memories return with ever-increasing clarity while great stretches of the prime of life vanish into obscurity is the nub of Ingmar Bergman’s drama.

Neil Sinyard is emeritus professor of film studies at the University of Hull in the UK. He has published twenty-five books on the cinema, including studies of such directors as Billy Wilder, William Wyler, Alfred Hitchcock, Fred Zinnemann, Steven Spielberg,...

Richard Brody is a film critic at the New Yorker and the author of Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.

Charles Dennis is an actor, playwright, and author of two books on Hollywood, Talent and The Dealmakers. His new play, A High Class Sort of Heel, is based on the life of George Sanders.

Jul 8, 2013 — With its marvelous, distinctive camera work, Kenji Mizoguchi’s searing drama is as technically remarkable as it is humane.