The Wave

Sep 26, 2011 — Toward the end of Olivier Assayas's Carlos, a young French diplomat's wife goes to answer the door of their flat in Beirut and is greeted by a huge bunch of flowers—which immediately disappears to reveal a gun that shoots her...

Sep 19, 2011 — When Claude Chabrol’s first film, Le beau Serge, had its premiere at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival (out of competition), a fellow critic at Cahiers du cinéma, François Truffaut, wrote: “Technically, the film is as masterly as if Chabrol had...

Apr 20, 2010 — In 1992, I went to Paris to see some movies that weren’t turning up on these shores, at least not as quickly as I wanted them to. At the time, it meant something particular to be going to Paris to...

Aug 14, 2006 — La collectionneuse is a strong, sensuously lush, deceptively slight film, a Riviera fruit with a bitter, uncompromising aftertaste. In retrospect, it is both classically Rohmeresque and atypical, as befits a film in which the director was still finding his way....

Apr 19, 2019 — In this excerpt from an interview on the edition of Diamonds of the Night, film programmer Irena Kovarova talks about the work of one of director Jan Němec’s key collaborators, Ester Krumbachová.

Nov 26, 2001 — Peter Weir’s first film to be released in America insists on the tangible power of spiritual life.

Jan 21, 2008 — In September 1997, I saw Agnès Varda introduce a brand-new 35 mm print of her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (made in 1954), to an admiring audience at Yale University. More astonishing than the luminous black-and-white images was Varda’s...

Apr 24, 2020 — The range this week stretches from silent Soviet classics through Hollywood’s heyday and the Czech New Wave to the revolutions of the late twentieth century.

Jan 6, 2022 — With the Omicron wave on the verge of peaking, Sundance calls off this year’s in-person events.

Oct 29, 2018 — With Lee Chang-dong’s latest film opening in U.S. theaters, we take a look at the second wave of critical response.