The Smoke Master

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

Apr 19, 2022 — Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist fable deploys barbed humor and surreal flourishes to depict class solidarity and human kindness in postwar Italy.

Nov 25, 2020 — “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a fatal abyss.” Wanda in The White Sheik (1952) I have a vivid memory from the first film-studies class I enrolled in, a class on Italian neorealism, where the weekly...

Sep 20, 2019 — In the winter of 1981, when I was young, I fell madly in love with a handsome poet. About two weeks into our affaire de cœur, we went to the Thalia on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to see...

Dec 7, 2018 — Christian Petzold’s films are like dances in which people circle each other but never quite connect. The most resonant moments in the German writer-director’s work are not ones of dialogue or plot development but of blocking and choreography: bodies intertwining,...

Feb 11, 2017 — Ermanno Olmi captures the dignity of work in this painterly vision of late nineteenth-century rural Italy.

Nov 10, 2014 — Monte Hellman’s existential westerns take Beckett to the desert.

Mar 28, 2025 — The week brings new issues of Film Quarterly and Cineaste and conversations with Michael Mann and Miguel Gomes.

Jul 31, 2023 — Featuring restorations of films by Chaplin, Henry King, Frank Borzage, Allan Dwan, the Museum’s series starts Wednesday.

May 24, 2017 — The Cannes Film Festival always kicks up a flurry of announcements of projects in the works. Now that we’ve just passed the halfway mark, let’s have a look at some of the more interesting titles we’ve heard about so far.“Robert...