Spiral

One of Japan’s most important filmmakers, Kenji Mizoguchi created a cinema rich in technical mastery and social commentary, specifically regarding the place of women in Japanese society.

Jun 25, 2013 — How Claude Lanzmann made a thoughtful film about the unthinkable and unfilmable.

Mar 12, 2013 — Working in America, German master Fritz Lang contributed to the anti-Nazi effort with this nightmarish, surreal tale of espionage.

Feb 25, 2013 — When an ethnographic filmmaker and a sociologist joined forces, they helped change the course of nonfiction cinema.

Sep 25, 2012 — No mere jigsaw movie, David Fincher’s thriller is also a nuanced character study, a satire of corporate culture, and a film about filmmaking.

Jun 19, 2012 — Steven Soderbergh delivers a poignant psychological portrait of the late Spalding Gray in this deftly structured documentary.

Jun 14, 2012 — Few movies feel as cold-blooded as Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave, a fact attributable as much to its striking and sinister visual approach as its bleak downward spiral of a plot and amoral main characters. In this clip from an interview...

Aug 23, 2011 — Intimidation: The Weird Dream MakerImpassioned and dedicated craftsman of some of Japanese cinema’s biggest box-office successes and most eccentric off-genre sorties, longtime Nikkatsu studios mainstay Koreyoshi Kurahara (1927–2002) was a filmmaker with two opposite yet inseparable signature points of view....

Jun 28, 2011 — Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro is the funniest book ever written in, and about, the French language. When it came out in 1959, it “made the whole of France laugh,” Jean-Paul Rappeneau, who helped Louis Malle adapt it to...

May 24, 2011 — In 1938, Charles Chaplin deposited with the Library of Congress a script for a film to be called The Dictator, and told the press it was a project in which he would play a double role. He clearly had Hitler...