Crime

Feb 22, 2011 — It wasn’t intended. No one could have predicted it. But Sweet Smell of Success turned out to be a terminus where several movie genres and subgenres converged and curdled, producing a uniquely delicious perfume of everlasting cynicism. Inhale deeply. And...

May 26, 2008 — Though producer Alexander Korda’s adventure movie forms part of a continued tradition of representing the East by purposefully occluding the reality of it, it celebrates the Arabian fantasy as a site of childlike wonder.

Mar 12, 2007 — Kon Ichikawa’s incendiary and extraordinarily brutal war film renders the emotional carnage that festers long after the battle’s end.

Mar 27, 2006 — The Italian drama marked the first full blossoming of director Vittorio De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini’s ongoing collaboration.

Feb 21, 2006 — Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) is an Ealing comedy in name only. True, it’s undeniably a comedy and was made by (though largely not at) Ealing. But in virtually every other respect, it deviates startlingly from the commonly accepted stereotype....

Dec 5, 2005 — René Clément’s masterpiece is dedicated to the radical Freudian proposal that living matter seeks the comfort of oblivion.

Aug 22, 2005 — This delicate, fascinating film is self-consciously, almost militantly, naive, and it remains something of an anomaly in Roberto Rossellini’s body of work.

Oct 18, 2004 — Nixon as Hamlet, Nixon as Lear, Nixon as Blanche DuBois, Nixon as Krapp—clutching every last tape to his breast with the wild fury and despair of a man on the precipice . . . Nixon in his study, poring over...

Sep 23, 2002 — Anticipating reality TV, Rémy Belvaux’s faux cinema verité satire follows a film crew documenting a mass murderer’s rampage.

Aug 19, 2002 — René Clair’s musical comedy comprises a window on a particular lost black and white neverworld—bouncy with melody, soaked in spring light, wistful about the conflicted relationship between serendipity and love.