Left Right Left

Jun 27, 2023 — With a divided self that reflected the fissures in his country in the wake of World War II, the most courageous and dangerous Italian artist of his generation transcended dogma and resisted affiliations.

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.

Jul 15, 2017 — “The film’s tag line was ‘They share the same body . . . but hate each other’s guts!’ I was told that the timing was a coincidence, but even before the film began it was clear that this was a...

Dec 1, 2016 — Repertory PicksSince September, the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive has been honoring the great Italian actor Anna Magnani with a career-spanning retrospective of her work. This Saturday, the series continues with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1962 sophomore feature, Mamma...

Mar 15, 2016 — Set during the height of McCarthy-era paranoia and arriving in 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Frankenheimer’s high-anxiety Communist conspiracy thriller tapped into the darkest fears of Cold War America.

Dec 16, 2013 — A melodramatic investigation of family and class, Kim Ki-young’s film exorcises some demons of 1960s South Korean society.

Oct 4, 2011 — Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work demonstrates an aversion for the present while simultaneously suggesting the impossibility of escaping it, and thus the need to confront it.

Sep 28, 2011 — As a film student at the University of Southern California, new to LA and without connections, Patricia Resnick had a habit of following film trucks, just to see where they’d lead. One took her to Westwood and the set of...

Jun 27, 2011 — A rogue’s gallery of vituperative 1950s vixens and night-world tough-guy gargoyles all coalescing in a constellation of twinkling cold war lights, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly is a film of a thousand stars. Stars of every sort, size, and description:...

Mar 22, 2011 — In 1985, deep into the twelve-year reign of the Reagan-Bush administration, Rob Epstein mounted a Hollywood stage with Richard Schmiechen, both men resplendent in tuxedos. Epstein was only twenty-nine years old. The director had just made history, with producer Schmiechen,...