I Was Nineteen

Dec 1, 2009 — The first words we hear are Sam Cutler’s: “Everybody seems to be ready—are we ready?” We were nowhere near ready for what was to come, there at the bitter end of the sixties. I remember that rainy day so well,...

Sep 22, 2009 — Abandoning the cinematic conventions and references that informed his previous works, Jean-Luc Godard’s explosive crime drama reaches new heights of spontaneity and lightning invention.

Sep 3, 2007 — It came from nowhere, it’s always been here—or so Stranger Than Paradise might seem.Jim Jarmusch had completed his first feature, Permanent Vacation, in 1980 and spent the next four years working on his second. Screened a few times as a...

Feb 25, 2016 — In Antonio Pietrangeli’s stunning 1967 character study I Knew Her Well, Stefania Sandrelli plays Adriana, an aspiring model and actress trying to make it in sixties Rome’s movie business and glittering social world. For Sandrelli, who was only nineteen years...

Sep 24, 2025 — She won the hearts of audiences and costars in The Leopard, 8½, and Fitzcarraldo.

Mar 23, 2021 — “Pleasure,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, “is a safer guide than either right or duty.” Surely this is true when it comes to watching films. While cinema can be edifying, most of us go to the...

Nov 20, 2020 — Standing before his friend Basil Hallward’s portrait of him, the paint barely dry, Dorian Gray implores to some unseen force: “If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old . ....

Feb 19, 2013 — Elia Kazan’s masterwork is a vivid, tough look at a time and place, and a transcendent human drama.

May 17, 2011 — “There was a strong influence of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal throughout this film,” director Masahiro Shinoda would later remember of his 1964 squid-ink noir Pale Flower, made in the days when his career as a filmmaker and founding figure of...

Jun 30, 2008 — The novelist Mishima Yukio stepped behind the camera to adapt his own short story, which depicts the act of seppuku as a thing of beauty.