The Brazilwood Man

Akira Kurosawa once said, “The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression. Toshiro Mifune needed only three feet.” The filmmaker certainly gave Mifune a lot of space, however: over the course of sixteen...

Jul 28, 2011 — We’re pleased to announce that Janus Films has picked up the North American rights to Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre, which, as you may have heard, premiered to much acclaim in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI (the...

Jul 27, 2011 — A sure sign that fall is coming: the Venice and Toronto film festivals (August 31–September 10 and September 8–18, respectively) have begun to announce their lineups. As usual, the schedules of these two important world-cinema showcases share some titles, destined...

Jul 26, 2011 — To a secular eye, Jean-Pierre Melville’s sixth feature film, Léon Morin, Priest (1961), is about almost anything except religion: the deleterious effects of sexual repression, the moral bleariness of wartime and life under occupation, the harsh inflections of history in...

Jul 8, 2011 — Marcel Carné’s rich backstage drama about the theater world of nineteenth-century Paris, Children of Paradise, is back—in a new form. Based on Jacques Prevert’s original scenario, a ballet version of the classic film, choreographed by José Carlos Martinez and scored...

Jul 6, 2011 — Cinephilia was the buzzword at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about that, of course, but the 2011 edition (the festival’s sixty-fifth—it’s the oldest continuously running film festival in the world), which ran from...

Jun 30, 2011 — Kurosawa’s films are about to get even more graphic. The Criterion Collection and the pop-up art gallery Tr!ckster are joining forces Friday, July 22, for a one-night-only celebration called A Tribute to the Films of Akira Kurosawa. Curated by our own Eric...

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...

Jun 24, 2011 — Venues for repertory film programming in the United States generally fall into one of three categories: revival houses, museums, and university cinematheques. It seems like you hear the least about the latter, but college campus theaters are undoubtedly helping to...

Jun 22, 2011 — Theresa Russell is attracted to the very things that repel most actors. In 1976’s The Last Tycoon, her first movie (and Elia Kazan’s last), she is unafraid of seeming to do very little. Young actresses like to show you they...