Incident Light

Mar 21, 2016 — Edward Yang’s masterful 1991 adolescent epic telegraphs the tensions and turbulence of 1960s Taiwan, when youth pop culture and teen street gangs became a major societal force.

Nov 10, 2014 — Monte Hellman’s existential westerns take Beckett to the desert.

Jun 16, 2014 — Georges Franju evokes the surreal silent serials of Louis Feuillade while constructing his own personal cinematic paradise.

May 5, 2014 — Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against...

Jan 27, 2014 — The author’s encounters with the great Indian filmmaker.

Jun 18, 2012 — Theater’s ultimate autobiographer, Spalding Gray, and cinema’s invisible-man auteur, Steven Soderbergh, teamed up for an eye-opening movie monologue.

Jan 24, 2012 — From the scary thuds and mysterious roars that accompany the no-frills titles to the bizarrely poignant final image of the monster, alone at the bottom of the ocean, Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla is all business and pure dream.

Jul 19, 2011 — In May 1956, an Indian film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. It wasn’t well attended. The Indian delegation had done little to promote it, arranging only a single midnight screening that clashed with a party in honor of...

Jun 21, 2011 — Chains: Bound for Glory Film history is replete with artists embraced by critics but misunderstood by the public. For Italian filmmaker Raffaello Matarazzo, it was the opposite. After working for almost two decades as a midlevel studio director of pictures...

Mar 21, 2011 — Living Room The cinema of Mikio Naruse is one of heartbreak but also one of indomitable poise. Melodrama is the director’s stock-in-trade. His stories are inhabited by people, generally women, imprisoned in their domestic and professional circumstances by the status...