The Hindenburg

Sep 22, 2009 — One enters any major film festival with hopes of discovering a budding auteur, a new voice from some previously unheard-from part of the world—a Julián Hernández or Corneliu Porumboiu or Bong Joon-ho. At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, however,...

Sep 8, 2009 — “It’s not my fault that I’m Japanese . . . yet it’s my worst crime that I am!” The words are those of Kaji, hero of The Human Condition (1959–61), but in his anguish and existential despair, he also speaks...

Aug 24, 2009 — Whit Stillman took a risk when he set his third film during (and titled it after) the disco era, whose erstwhile existence, from almost the moment it ended, has seemed to embarrass most Americans more than Watergate. One would think...

Aug 19, 2009 — I Am Waiting: Port of Call The year: 1957. The city: Yokohama, not far from the piers. The sound of the tide softly lapping against stones in the darkness, cubes of black ice in a tumbler of foam. Night. Rain....

Aug 2, 2009 — Have we found the perfect way to while away those lazy beach days at your Hamptons getaway, and pay homage to everyone’s favorite beach recluses, Big and Little Edie Beale, at the same time: Grey Gardens collectible coloring books! This...

Jul 13, 2009 — Like Gary Giddins in his recent Criterion essay, Andrew O’Hehir, in an engaging and sharp new DVD review for Salon, sets out to refute the long-held misconception that Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal is a humorless, medicinal monolith. Pointing out...

Jun 23, 2009 — The summer 2009 issue of Film Quarterly (now in its fiftieth year!) is out, and in it renowned professor and film theorist Laura Mulvey presents a close reading of Max Ophuls’s The Earrings of Madame de . . . ,...

Jun 8, 2009 — As I write this, it has been a year and a half since Ingmar Bergman passed away—and I miss him daily. I miss his imagination and the comfort he gave, both personally and through his films. I got to know...

May 20, 2009 — Iconoclasts are meant to kill their idols, and so it’s fitting that Shohei Imamura launched into his career as if on a patricidal rampage. Like Nagisa Oshima, the other towering figure of the Japanese New Wave, Imamura (1926–2006) rejected the...

May 14, 2009 — A new, restored print of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes is premiering in Cannes tonight, with Martin Scorsese going onstage to introduce it. So what’s the big Scorsese-Powell connection anyway? Well, you can learn all about it...