On the Sea

Aug 16, 2019 — In making her nonfiction film The Inland Sea (1991), a poetic chronicle of a journey around the Japanese islands of the eponymous body of water, director Lucille Carra relied on a tried-and-true itinerary. A 1971 travelogue by Donald Richie, also...

Apr 10, 2019 — One Scene Dušan Makavejev’s boundary-pushing 1974 film Sweet Movie gleefully skewers the forces of social oppression with a twisted double narrative and Day-Glo scenarios. At a time when the director’s native Yugoslavia was carving out a unique position somewhere between the political...

Sep 19, 2017 — Last year, Dmitry Golotyuk and Antonina Derzhitskaya spoke with Jean-Luc Godard for the Russian publication Séance, and now Craig Keller has translated nine excerpts. The conversation evidently took place in Rolle, the modest town in Switzerland with a population of...

Sep 19, 1994 — The French do not have to take crash courses in order to deal with the man/woman thing. It is in their blood and in their civilization. Hence, they do not have to compensate for a habitual sexism with extravagant portraits...

May 21, 2017 — Sea Sorrow, premiering Out of Competition at the Cannes Film Festival, is Vanessa Redgrave’s directorial debut. “A heartfelt, formally messy documentary about the international refugee crisis, the movie is largely a plea for compassion and action,” writes Manohla Dargis in...

Jun 20, 2016 — School’s out for summer! And what better way to mark this first day of the season than by revisiting Richard Linklater’s classic 1993 teen comedy Dazed and Confused. Set in suburban Texas in 1976 amid a haze of bong smoke...

Jun 27, 2019 — Early reviews of the Hereditary director’s second feature may be mixed, but everyone agrees that it’s quite a trip.

Nov 17, 2025 — Ten years before Ghost in the Shell, the director made one of his most enigmatic and personal works.

Jul 5, 2013 — Did You See This?• Movies from sea to shining sea • J. Hoberman gets medieval. • Woody Allen can’t stop working. • The Saul Bellow cinema that never was • Monochrome movies are back. • Richard Brody is under the...

May 21, 2017 — So the idea here should be self-evident, but just in case: click a title to see the first round of critical response—reviews, interviews, video, and so forth—and check back now and again, as nearly every entry below is updated for...