A Man of His Time

Feb 16, 2016 — In Death by Hanging, Nagisa Oshima spins a complex aesthetic web around his documentary-like structure, packing detail, history, politics, and emotion into his surrealist inquiry into capital punishment.

Sep 8, 2015 — Brian De Palma magnifies the pleasures and perils of Hitchcock and toys with the viewer’s spectatorship in his sly and scary horror masterpiece.

Feb 10, 2015 — The late film scholar beautifully analyzes the visual lyricism of the French master’s legendary short work.

Jan 28, 2014 — Terence Davies beckons the viewer into a private world of moods and sensations with this exquisite childhood reverie.

Jul 16, 2013 — Theater legend Peter Brook’s approach to bringing the classic fable about human savagery to the screen was radical in its straightforwardness.

Jul 8, 2013 — With its marvelous, distinctive camera work, Kenji Mizoguchi’s searing drama is as technically remarkable as it is humane.

Oct 25, 2011 — An Erle C. Kenton–directed Paramount feature based on the 1896 H. G. Wells novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, Island of Lost Souls (1932) is the story of a mad scientist’s attempts to convert wild animals into human beings by...

Oct 24, 2011 — “For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis,” says the narrator of Don DeLillo’s novel The Names. “It daunted me, that somber rock. I preferred to wander in the modern city, imperfect, blaring. The weight and moment of...

Nov 9, 2009 — The following essay, written in October 1987, after the release of Wings of Desire, originally appeared in The Logic of Images, a collection of Wim Wenders’s writing that was published in 1992. In the last few years, since Paris, Texas, Berlin...

Oct 20, 2008 — Though he had been directing films since the silent era, Kenji Mizoguchi didn’t become an international sensation until after the Second World War, benefiting from a new fascination with Japan’s cinematic output.