We Own the Night

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.

Feb 28, 2014 — The Great Beauty, which is up for best foreign-language film at Sunday’s Academy Awards, feels at times like a glorious throwback to a time when art-house cinema reigned. Feeling nostalgic for that era, when films by the great directors of world...

Sep 16, 2013 — Ingmar Bergman plumbs the depths of a fractured family and gives Ingrid Bergman a shocking star role.

May 15, 2012 — Circumlocutory critic Perkus Tooth sits down with a very patient Spike Jonze to talk gerunds and colons.

Oct 25, 2011 — The film is made up of a succession of small visions, observed and executed with apparent ease but thought through with such exquisite care and attention that the experience becomes overwhelming.

Mar 15, 2011 — Based on Louis Malle’s childhood memories, this period drama traces the wary, prickly friendship between two boys, one of whom is hiding from the Nazis.

May 20, 2010 — Driven to Destruction Nagisa Oshima was a destructive force in Japanese cinema—and he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Intent on exploding taboos and jabbing the eye of the status quo, he created films that leave us with a...

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...

Mar 18, 2009 — Writer, critic, and film lecturer Teruyo Nogami also served as one of Akira Kurosawa’s principal assistants. Hired as script supervisor on 1950’s Rashomon, Nogami went on to work on all of Kurosawa’s subsequent films, later chronicling their unique relationship in...

Jun 25, 2007 — Chris Marker’s masterpiece is a cinematic essay and travel film made up of asides and digressions that form a portrait of late twentieth-century civilization.