Pig

May 20, 2009 — The title alone screams incongruity. Shohei Imamura’s 1961 black-and-white caper movie Pigs and Battleships bursts with the confusion and exuberance of a cross-cultural encounter. In its lively portrayal of enthusiastic Japanese locals welcoming the U.S. Navy on R&R to the...

Dec 25, 2008 — Robert Rossellini’s efforts to put history into images would yield some forty-two hours of “didactic” movies, mostly for television.

Dec 21, 2008 — In 1962, Roberto Rossellini called a press conference in a bookshop in Rome and announced that the cinema was dead. “There’s a crisis not just in film but culture as a whole,” he explained. Increasingly, Rossellini had understood the great...

Dec 4, 2006 — William Greaves’s masterpiece uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary.

Aug 22, 2005 — This delicate, fascinating film is self-consciously, almost militantly, naive, and it remains something of an anomaly in Roberto Rossellini’s body of work.

Sep 29, 2003 — “Gray literature” is the term German film historians use to describe the material written purely for publicity purposes and made available to the press, but not meant for official publication. Often this gray literature, which is only accessible to film...

Aug 28, 2000 — In what is arguably his most popular and enduring feature, W. C. Fields nails the American tendency to inflate one’s importance.

Nov 1, 1999 — The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a profoundly beguiling movie about sex, love, and rebellion.

Jan 11, 1994 — A harrowing nightmare about life in inner-city hell, this 1993 sleeper-hit is a powerhouse filmmaking debut by the Hughes brothers.

Jan 11, 1988 — In Young and Innocent (1937) Alfred Hitchcock uses all the signs in his visual vocabulary to tell one of his favorite stories: fugitive hero unjustly accused of murder. Yet this is also a story of youth and innocence triumphant—a light...