The Human Being

Feb 5, 2017 — Kirsten Johnson interrogates the thorny ethics of nonfiction filmmaking in her intriguingly elliptical blend of essay, travelogue, and memoir.

Dec 1, 2015 — Critic Todd McCarthy takes an inside look at Michael Ritchie's outdoor drama, which he calls “spare, cut to the bone, as fine as dry powder. Had Hemingway ever written about competitive skiing, this would have been the right style with...

Nov 19, 2015 — Satyajit Ray’s long-heralded cinematic achievement was influenced by European cinema but also grew out of long-standing Indian artistic tradition.

May 29, 2015 — A shocking chapter of Soviet Czechoslovakian history is dramatized in Costa-Gavras’s controversial follow-up to Z.

Sep 9, 2013 — As outré as it is, the most subversive thing about this classic farce is its take on what’s normal.

Jul 23, 2013 — Asked by French journalists in a 2001 interview what recent films he most admired, Brian De Palma named Ang Lee’s 1997 The Ice Storm. It was surprising to hear one of the leaders of a filmmaking revolution that aimed at...

Jan 22, 2013 — Andrei Tarkovsky’s austere, minimalist, and poetic film was the first major accomplishment in an oeuvre that would become one of Russia’s main contributions to the treasury of world cinema.

Sep 25, 2012 — No mere jigsaw movie, David Fincher’s thriller is also a nuanced character study, a satire of corporate culture, and a film about filmmaking.

Sep 13, 2011 — Hollywood has been importing talented European filmmakers at least since the early twenties, when Victor Sjöström and Ernst Lubitsch heeded the siren wail of Tinseltown resources, and their work there has tended to quickly obscure the cultural memory of the...

Aug 13, 2010 — The Docks of New York When John Grierson, the Scotsman whose absolute devotion to realism on film—he coined the word documentary and created the National Film Board of Canada—was asked how he’d enjoyed a screening of a now-lost Josef von Sternberg...