This Is Not a Film

Mar 1, 2024 — This week offers David Bordwell on Hou Hsiao-hsien’s evolution, Jean Eustache on Ernst Lubitsch, and two must-read reviews of About Dry Grasses.

Jun 10, 2024 — The Canadian filmmaker and artist reflects on his award-winning 1996 breakthrough, a work of voluptuous style and fierce political commitment that remains a landmark of New Queer Cinema.

May 24, 2024 — During a period of seismic change in U.S. history, the Hollywood studio system began to fracture beyond repair, resulting in a new freedom in how movies explored themes of violence, psychosis, and social breakdown.

Apr 30, 2019 — With these twin monuments of Hong Kong action filmmaking, Jackie Chan catapulted to international stardom, perfecting a unique blend of athleticism and populism.

May 19, 2015 — Charlie Chaplin’s intensely emotional drama is a dream film about show business, history, and death.

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

Jun 23, 2008 — Five years of increasingly horrific news from the former Yugoslavia made Milcho Manchevski’s searing yet lyrical film timely to a degree that few filmmakers have ever achieved.

Aug 2, 2004 — Dismissed as minor Jean Renoir, the film deserves better, especially when seen in the larger context of numerous American and European films of the 1950s and their shared preoccupation with theater and performance.

Jan 8, 1996 — Dodes’ka-den was made at a low point in Akira Kurosawa’s long career-perhaps the lowest that the director has ever known. In the preface of the filmmaker’s autobiography, critic and translator Audie Bock reports that Kurosawa’s commercial prospects became bleak in...

Feb 16, 2021 — “Me myself, I prefer literature,” the Senegalese author-filmmaker Ousmane Sembène tells a group of African students in the 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema. “But in our time, literature is a luxury.” Sembène’s historical conjuncture—Africa’s putative transition from...