The Remains of the Day

Jul 19, 2004 — In Yasujiro Ozu’s hands, the extended-family drama widened its focus to encompass friends, neighbors, and employers.

Apr 28, 2003 — The fourth installment in François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel saga is a comedy about marriage, the desire to escape it, and the craftiness involved in running from one’s own desires.

Sep 17, 2001 — Jirí Menzel’s war comedy is an absurdist symphony of self-absorption and impotence.

Sep 25, 1995 — Noel Coward and David Lean’s drama is the Citizen Kane of war movies, as well as the precursor to Lean’s even more celebrated works.

Jul 12, 2022 — In David Lean’s Venice-set romance, a fleeting love affair prompts a woman’s self-exploration.

Jan 8, 2019 — “Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated” is how Abbas Kiarostami once described his late turn toward minimalism. While the Iranian director was known for the intricate, metatextual playfulness of his work, he also spent much of his career...

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...

Mar 21, 2011 — Living Room The cinema of Mikio Naruse is one of heartbreak but also one of indomitable poise. Melodrama is the director’s stock-in-trade. His stories are inhabited by people, generally women, imprisoned in their domestic and professional circumstances by the status...

Jun 16, 2010 — What seems so extraordinary to me about Mystery Train, watching it again twenty years after its deadpan arrival, is not just how fresh and vivid—how utterly timeless—it remains but the extent to which it truly embraces both the myth and...