A Perfect Ending

Jul 17, 2017 — “Steven Spielberg laid claim to the Normandy beach landing,” begins Variety’s Peter Debruge, “Clint Eastwood owns Iwo Jima, and now, Christopher Nolan has authored the definitive cinematic version of Dunkirk. Unlike those other battles, however, this last was not a...

Jan 13, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s characters play an endlessly layered game of dress-up in this tale of sadomasochistic love.

May 12, 2014 — The Italian cinema expert describes the immense popularity of Dino Risi’s film in its home country, and the way it deepened the commedia all’italiana genre.

Oct 25, 2009 — Costa-Gavras’s 1969 political assassination thriller Z appeared at the end of a decade of burgeoning cultural change and rampant paranoia. In the United States, this Algerian-French coproduction sparked a sensation, not just relaying the European political crisis but perfectly capturing...

Jul 14, 2008 — Linguistic cosmopolitanism in the Babel-like world of commerce and culture is one of Jacques Tati’s several satirical targets.

Jan 21, 2008 — The feminist politics of Agnès Varda’s marital drama were ahead of their time, but it is on the level of form that the film is so unsettling and calls up contradictory interpretations.

Oct 15, 2001 — Preston Sturges’s beloved comedy provides insights into the way Hollywood formulas work on us.

Jul 24, 2018 — A feast of sumptuous color and cinematic imagination, Powell and Pressburger’s postwar masterpiece is also a powerful reckoning with recent history.

Jan 15, 2017 — To make the performance of a tedious, exacting, time-consuming task riveting to watch, it is only necessary for the activity to be illegal.

Nov 12, 2007 — What is left of Berlin Alexanderplatz, this endless canon of the sublime and the trivial, is thus a perpetuum mobile of the human dance of love and death.