Short Plays

Jan 21, 2008 — While Agnès Varda was prescient in picking up on the new social phenomenon of France’s young female drifters, she also anticipated the culture of extreme individualism that has come to dominate Western society since the 1980s.

Aug 13, 2007 — Samuel Fuller knew how to handle a gun from his army days, and this experience colored all of his filmmaking, which he began at the age of thirty-six.

Jun 11, 2007 — Over the past month or so, it seems as though glancing references to Criterion are popping up everywhere. This morning, I saw Bob Stein, one of the original founders of Criterion, in New York magazine, being interviewed for his fashion...

Jun 11, 2007 — Claude Berri’s witty comedy-drama depicts Nazi sympathizers with three-dimensional candor, neither whitewashing nor apologizing for their misguided ideas.

Mar 26, 2007 — Across five films, the Swedish director defined his guiding themes and cinematic style.

Feb 19, 2007 — For a director whose vision is so frequently called pessimistic, Mikio Naruse’s drama exhibits a lightness of touch, deft and coolly understated, like its cocktail jazz score.

Oct 23, 2006 — The New Zealand director’s debut feature is a bridge between her tentative, probing film school works and her subsequent female character studies.

Aug 21, 2006 — A key Gen-X comedy about postgraduate angst, Noah Baumbach’s debut feature is an uproarious union of wit and trauma.

Aug 14, 2006 — The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career are not Eric Rohmer’s first films. By 1963, he had made several shorts and one feature, Le signe du Lion. Yet these two short works—with their meticulously charted Paris locations; their semidocumentary...

Oct 24, 2005 — Kihachi Okamoto’s subversion of the samurai movie possesses the same gritty, stark realism with regard to imagery and body count, yet the tone is decidedly comic.