Passing Through

Jun 11, 2015 — The author recalls the two great cinematographers and their work.

Jul 22, 2013 — Gabriel Axel’s exquisite adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s short tale of grace through art provides spiritual and sensual sustenance.

Oct 25, 2011 — The film is made up of a succession of small visions, observed and executed with apparent ease but thought through with such exquisite care and attention that the experience becomes overwhelming.

May 5, 2009 — Every second of David Fincher’s uncanny drama—every shot and every cut, every gesture and every facial expression, every turn in its narrative and every visual effect—is devoted to the contemplation of time’s passing.

Jul 16, 2008 — The locations for many of Ingmar Bergman’s most dramatically spare films have existed for so long in moviegoers’ minds as stark black-and-white dream states that to walk through them in living, vibrant color is truly transformative. Imagine the harsh, pebbled...

Apr 21, 2008 — There’s an irony to the fact that Japanese master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu lived his life as a bachelor, for he made some of the world’s most insightful, lived-in, and emotionally authentic films about marriage and parenthood.

Sep 3, 2007 — Iwas a cab driver once myself (in Los Angeles, in the mid-1970s), and I’ve been sensitive ever since to how the profession is portrayed on the screen. As it happened, I was driving a cab when Taxi Driver came out,...

Dec 4, 2006 — A companion piece to Grey Gardens, this documentary stands on its own as a portrait of two women creatively passing the time as Rome burns.

Sep 29, 2026 — With their mix of comedy, ecstasy, and aesthetic strangeness, the French auteur’s first three features grant us access to psychic states that we might not otherwise be able to enter.

Sep 18, 2026 — We’re remembering Patricio Guzmán and spotlighting new writing on Sarah Maldoror, Tsui Hark, and the Up series.