Smile Before Death

Jan 20, 2014 — Aki Kaurismäki pays wry tribute to the starving artist in his sad and funny update of Henri Murger’s classic book.

Jun 17, 2013 — The author recounts the story of his friendship with the great filmmaker.

Mar 26, 2013 — Charlie Chaplin manages to make a ruthless murderer likable in his brilliant satire of middle-class morality.

Mar 25, 2013 — Robert Bresson’s prison-break story is a tale of religious faith and a work of striking purity.

Jul 14, 2012 — Simply stated, Wes Anderson is the most original presence in American film comedy since Preston Sturges. He is as boundlessly confident as  Sturges was in his heyday, and he has a similarly keen ear for gaudy dialogue; a gift for...

Aug 24, 2011 — NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers. Not long into Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine (2007), a melodrama about suffering, salvation, and the dangerously blurred line between belief and madness, the heroine encounters the first of several challenges to her way of...

Apr 25, 2011 — In 1981, the legendary critic went all out for Blow Out, which she thought was De Palma's most mature work to date.

Nov 26, 2010 — Early in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, as the wind from the Texas plains whips the small town of Anarene, the high-school senior Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) halts his recalcitrant pickup truck—Hank Williams is warbling “Why Don’t You Love...

Sep 28, 2010 — “The past, again and again.” —Major Jack Celliers, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence Nagisa Oshima’s filmmaking career began with the risen sun—or rather, with the promise of a sun soon to rise: Tomorrow’s Sun (1959), a dizzyingly designed faux “coming attraction”...

Mar 30, 2010 — The work of Pedro Costa has progressed in slow, measured steps, but each step has been a giant leap. His slowness is both the condition and the consequence of ethical standards he shares with precious few directors of his generation....