Jul 20, 2021 — Dismissed as gossip-column fodder in its time, Jacques Deray’s cooly enigmatic villa thriller is an exploration of masculine vanity and feminine disillusion.

Jan 18, 2018 — The lineups for the sixty-eighth Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 15 through 25, are coming hard and fast now. Today sees rollouts for the Forum, the main attraction for many a cinephile, and the Berlinale Series. With descriptions...

Jul 21, 2017 — The Venice International Film Festival has announced that Rosita (1923), “famed as the single collaboration between two of the giants of the silent screen, the director Ernst Lubitsch and the star Mary Pickford, is the film that has been chosen...

Oct 29, 2001 — Peter Medak’s stinging satire is unashamedly theatrical, emerging from a fascinating period in English culture when theatre and cinema together were mining a rich vein of flamboyant self-analysis.

Jun 3, 2001 — Jacques Tati’s singular satire is a series of giddy encounters between people and things in which the wonders of “modern life” relinquish their functionality in favor of an unaccountably rapturous beauty.

Feb 5, 2018 — This year marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the occasion for Jill Lepore’s outstanding piece in this week’s New Yorker: Frankenstein is four stories in one: an allegory, a fable, an...

Dec 1, 2009 — The first words we hear are Sam Cutler’s: “Everybody seems to be ready—are we ready?” We were nowhere near ready for what was to come, there at the bitter end of the sixties. I remember that rainy day so well,...

Feb 13, 2017 — One Scene Romantic love is poignant because it is an infinite feeling that exists in a finite frame. And Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy is the most romantic and profound of love stories because it imbues love with the weight of...

May 17, 2022 — Juzo Itami’s tragicomic directorial debut has scandalous fun with the Japanese traditions governing death.

Aug 21, 2019 — One Scene One of my absolute favorite quotes from Douglas Sirk—and he has a million of ’em—was made in reference to Magnificent Obsession. “It is a combination of kitsch and craziness and trashiness,” he said (this isn’t the quote quite...