A Poet

Jun 24, 2018 — During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.

Sep 19, 2016 — If you consider noir as a global phenomenon, then films like Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le moko (1937), Jean Renoir’s La bête humaine (1938), and Carné’s Port of Shadows (1938) may be the first full harvest of this bitter crop.

Jul 19, 2016 — A cornerstone of the martial arts film genre, King Hu’s magisterial A Touch of Zen was the first Chinese movie to receive a prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Thanks to a pristine new restoration, this sprawling portrait of Ming...

Sep 29, 2015 — Merchant Ivory Productions’ sun-kissed romantic comedy is an effervescent tale of class and manners among the Edwardian English.

Mar 18, 2014 — In addition to technical brilliance and a humanist message, Akira Kurosawa’s adventure features one of the director’s strongest female characters.

Oct 16, 2013 — Georges Franju deftly balances fantasy and realism, clinical detachment and operatic emotion, beauty and pain, all presided over by Edith Scob’s haunting, haunted eyes.

Aug 19, 2013 — This moving drama about gender, race, and class in 1960s Kolkata is a pioneering work from Satyajit Ray.

Aug 31, 2011 — City symphony or spa burlesque? Polemic or caprice? From the outset, even in his manifesto lecture “Towards a Social Cinema,” delivered to the Groupement des Spectateurs d’Avant-Garde at Paris’s Le Vieux-Colombier before what was only the second public screening of À propos...

Jul 13, 2010 — At the author’s request, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first. Ozu Yasujiro’s personal feelings about Japanese militarism in the 1930s and 1940s are not on record. Perhaps, like most people around him, he accepted the...

Dec 9, 2002 — What makes Jean-Luc Godard’s classic so unique a viewing experience today, even more than in 1963, is the way it stimulates an audience’s intelligence as well as its senses.