Empire of the Sun

Feb 12, 2021 — This week we’re revisiting Tarkovsky, catching up with Shelley Duvall, and listening to Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino talk movies.

Nov 21, 2005 — Akira Kurosawa’s late masterpiece is a tragedy fed by Shakespeare, Noh, and the samurai epic; it shows human brutality, warfare, and suffering as if from the eye of a dispassionate God.

Jul 19, 2010 — “It is the most erotic film that I have ever made,” wrote Michael Powell of Black Narcissus. “It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image, from the beginning to the end.”

Nov 5, 2019 — What began as an artificially stoked-up controversy has led to a vital statement on the present and future of cinema.

Mar 17, 2026 — In her first and only theatrical feature, director Lynne Littman presents an unbearably intimate vision of apocalypse, focusing on the effects of a nuclear blast on one suburban American family.

Dec 29, 2022 — Martin Scorsese, Hayao Miyazaki, Catherine Breillat, Michael Mann, Christian Petzold, David Fincher . . .

Feb 26, 2024 — The Berlinale’s top award went to Dahomey on an evening that has sparked heated debate.

Jul 24, 2018 — A feast of sumptuous color and cinematic imagination, Powell and Pressburger’s postwar masterpiece is also a powerful reckoning with recent history.

Feb 25, 2025 — Like many of the characters found throughout the director’s oeuvre, the alternative-press staffers at the center of her sophomore feature are bound up in a perpetual tug-of-war between past and present realities.

Jan 24, 2025 — We’re sampling new issues of Notebook, Senses of Cinema, and 032c and reading about Eisenstein and Charlotte Zwerin.