The Spacewalker

Aug 20, 2001 — Preston Sturges’s generous-hearted satire achieves a synthesis that is both terribly funny and deeply moving.

Aug 20, 2001 — Carl Dreyer’s modern tragedy eschews melodrama, striking a balance between suffering and triviality.

Aug 20, 2001 — The strangeness of Ordet is something that no number of viewings, God willing, will rub off. I want to stress this strangeness. That Ordet is a great film, one of the greatest ever made, only a rash or foolish person...

Aug 20, 2001 — Carl Dreyer’s 17th-century period piece leaves all major questions frustratingly unresolved yet vibrantly open, quivering and radiant with life and meaning.

Jul 9, 2001 — Directed by Bruce Robinson, this eccentric, disquieting satire about Madison Avenue transforms from fevered realism to symbolic fantasy.

Jul 9, 2001 — With its dunderhead millionaires, erudite bums, effulgently dysfunctional families, and beneficent providence, My Man Godfrey is the Depression comedy par excellence. It is also, superficially at least, a movie about the Depression. A suicidal millionaire regains his zest for living...

Jun 18, 2001 — Bathed in scarlet hues, Ingmar Bergman’s period drama is his most daring attempt to achieve a dream state on film.

Apr 23, 2001 — Of all the actors to try their hand at producing, Kirk Douglas may have been the most audacious. Spartacus illustrates his taste for unorthodox material, and the story behind the making of the movie reveals a great deal about Douglas’...

Apr 23, 2001 — Released in late 1938, Alexander Nevsky was not only the first sound film to be directed by Sergei Eisenstein, but the director’s political comeback as well. This most famous of Soviet artists had not completed a movie since The Old...

Apr 23, 2001 — In 1955, Jules Dassin, an American director in exile in Paris, made this flat-out perfect piece of cinema. The film came as a redemption for Dassin: a one-time promising young director cranking out B-movies under an MGM contract ("They were...