The Good Life

Jun 26, 2013 — On the life and work of the famous Czech author, and the pleasures and challenges of translating him.

Mar 29, 2013 — When the world’s favorite comedian asked his audience to see him as a sociopathic serial killer, he was venturing where cinema had barely dared to tread.

Feb 25, 2013 — When an ethnographic filmmaker and a sociologist joined forces, they helped change the course of nonfiction cinema.

Aug 28, 2012 — A frenetic portrait of New York as well as a love story, Paul Fejos’s film captures the odd sensation of being alone in the big city, even when in a crowd.

Aug 14, 2012 — The Dardennes threw down the gauntlet for a new type of unadorned dramatic storytelling with their breakthrough tale of a working-class boy’s fraught coming-of-age.

Jun 25, 2012 — For this Edinburgh-based writer and filmmaker, Hitchcock’s Scottish caper is both fantasy and reality.

May 22, 2012 — These five films chart the unlikely ascendance of a hero of American underground cinema.

Dec 6, 2011 — The Lady Vanishes (1938) is the film that best exemplifies Alfred Htchcock’s often-asserted desire to offer audiences not a slice of life but a slice of cake. Even Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, in their pioneering study of Hitchcock, for...

Sep 27, 2011 — Internationally, Victor Sjöström is best known for his performance as Professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). But behind that unforgettable face of old age is a younger man, a leading actor who was also the greatest Swedish...

Aug 30, 2011 — A startling blend of fantasy and reality, Lindsay Anderson’s satirical tale of adolescent rebellion personifies the 1960s.