Nov 29, 2022 — Nina Menkes is a filmmaker whose works radically synthesize inner dream worlds with brutal outer realities. Her films have screened at major international film festivals, including Sundance, the Berlinale, Locarno, and Toronto. Menkes’s narrative films include Magdalena Viraga, Queen of...

Feb 27, 2018 — In a new episode of Observations on Film Art, film-studies scholar Kristin Thompson analyzes the lyrical techniques in Raymond Bernard’s brutal war drama Wooden Crosses.

Jun 17, 2014 — The brutal lessons of Vietnam remained in America’s national consciousness for a generation. September 11 gave us collective amnesia, and they’ve had to be learned again.

Jun 19, 2013 — Disorienting, brutal, and bloody beautiful, František Vláčil’s epic is a dark medieval vision teeming with cinematic invention.

Sep 24, 1992 — It was in 1947 that Vladimir Nabokov began writing what he described as “a short novel about a man who liked little girls.” Completed in 1954, the manuscript was rejected as pornographic by at least four New York publishers. Nabokov...

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 — Louis Malle’s World War II–era drama follows a young collaborationist in rural France and asks how people with no interest in politics become active participants in brutal torture.

Feb 10, 2003 — The poet Paul Eluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car. Ordinarily, I would settle for that. However, with so much being written about the film...

Mar 12, 2001 — Mona Lisa has several reasons for being. One was an article from a British tabloid about an ex-convict on a GBH charge who claimed in his defense to be protecting ladies of the night against their Maltese pimps. Steve Woolley,...

Jul 1, 2025 — Made nearly two decades into Fritz Lang’s Hollywood career, this brutal noir is designed for maximum velocity and impact, eschewing the director’s accustomed flourishes in favor of a stark literalness.