The Punishment

Jul 15, 2014 — Ihave an unusually easy way of remembering when I first became fascinated by Robert Bresson’s films. Pickpocket (1959) was the first one I saw, at the old Orson Welles theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in my late teens; it was also...

Jan 24, 2014 — Aki Kaurismäki first read Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème in 1976. The highly influential 1851 book—an episodic novel about a group of starving artists that also inspired Puccini’s 1896 opera La bohème—captured the Finnish filmmaker’s imagination and,...

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.

Feb 15, 2022 — Playful irreverence gives way to tragedy and transcendence in Leo McCarey’s 1939 masterwork, one of the defining romances of the Hollywood studio era.

Dec 31, 2019 — Check out what’s in store next month on our streaming service!

Jan 4, 2018 — Even as we look ahead to the films we’re hoping to see this year, there’s still some 2017 sorting to do. And let’s begin with Farran Smith Nehme’s refreshing list of some of the older films she caught last year....

Nov 15, 2018 — In two made-for-television productions, a middle-aged Ingmar Bergman blurred the boundaries between screen and stage.

Mar 3, 2020 — Mohammad Rasoulof has won the Berlinale’s Golden Bear, and Eliza Hittman is taking home the grand jury prize.

Jun 24, 2018 — During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.

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...