Jan 5, 2006 — Akira Kurosawa appreciated Shake­speare’s knack for linking the private and the political, threading a tale of corruption and revenge through a tangle of blood ties.

Jan 5, 2006 — A gray flannel ghost story in which the living haunt the dead, the least appreciated of Akira Kurosawa’s midperiod collaborations with Toshiro Mifune throws open the windows of Japanese corporate corruption.

Sep 26, 2017 — The sexual pedagogy of a masochistic music instructor takes center stage in this shocking study of art, control, and repression.

Mar 16, 2015 — Director and star Robert Montgomery suffuses his moody 1947 New Mexico–set noir with palpable postwar anxiety and expressive fatalism.

Aug 12, 1991 — It is 1945. For the first time in four years, the Southern Pacific stops in Black Rock.  A one-armed man named John J. MacReedy (Spencer Tracy) steps off the train. This brooding stranger makes the few residents who inhabit the...

Apr 14, 2008 — Allen Baron’s stark, moody Blast of Silence (1961) is a movie of many strange distinctions. It’s among the last of the true film noirs, those fatalistic black-and-white urban crime dramas that darkened the American screen so gloriously in the years...

Feb 6, 2019 — On the Criterion edition of Secret Sunshine, Lee Chang-dong describes his creative process as one of utter despair. That should come as no surprise to anyone who knows his work. Since making his feature debut, Green Fish, in 1997 at...

May 24, 2019 — In her quest for romantic connection, the protagonist of Claire Denis’s searching, slyly funny Let the Sunshine In—Parisian painter Isabelle (Juliette Binoche)—finds herself falling in with a series of hopelessly self-involved men: an oleaginous (and married) banker, an elegant (but...

Jul 9, 2018 — The product of consummate artistry and savvy promotion, Marlene Dietrich’s salacious image opened up erotic frontiers for a generation of moviegoers.

May 11, 2009 — “It’s taken more than fifty years, but the world has finally caught up with [the] dark and cynical vision” of Billy Wilder’s chillingly black satire of the fourth estate, Ace in the Hole, A. O. Scott declares in a clever...