Presence

Nov 19, 2007 — Ingmar Bergman made some outstanding films before Sawdust and Tinsel (1953). But that film, released in America under the meretricious title The Naked Night—and known in Sweden as The Clown’s Evening—was the first that no other director could have made....

Oct 6, 2007 — In Gus Van Sant’s first feature, gayness—blind, unembarrassed homosexual lust—is the narrative’s driving force.

Aug 20, 2007 — David Mamet’s debut film was a welcome throwback to the primacy of character and careful story construction, at a time when narrative intricacy was in short supply on American movie screens.

Aug 13, 2007 — Samuel Fuller knew how to handle a gun from his army days, and this experience colored all of his filmmaking, which he began at the age of thirty-six.

Jul 9, 2007 — Set almost entirely in a single house, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s eloquent collaboration with writer Kobo Abe shows both his powerful staging and his love of fine, almost microscopic, detail.

Jun 11, 2007 — Over the past month or so, it seems as though glancing references to Criterion are popping up everywhere. This morning, I saw Bob Stein, one of the original founders of Criterion, in New York magazine, being interviewed for his fashion...

Apr 23, 2007 — Louis Malle’s documentary work adopts certain tenets of cinéma direct—improvisation, minimal crew, the refusal to organize reality—and applies them to a consistently class-conscious, outsider perspective.

Mar 19, 2007 — In 1945 Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, a canny and gifted tabloid newspaper photographer, did something unprecedented: he assembled some of his best shots, of corpses and fires and arrests and crowds and spectacles, and made them into a book,...

Mar 16, 2007 — The first of his films to be shown outside Japan, Ichikawa Kon’s twenty-seventh feature dramatically raised the director’s profile.

Jan 22, 2007 — Spencer Gordon Bennet’s eclectic science fiction–adventure movie bundles a serious patriotic message within its retelling of the Odysseus myth.