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.

Dec 2, 2010 — Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1968) opens in a shiny space: nuns breeze past; a woman in a white uniform clacks through, bearing towels; a baby cries. People wait. The feeling is “hospital.” A second woman in white delivers towels, and we...

Aug 18, 2009 — Jacques Tati’s masterpiece converts work into play so pleasurably that it turns the very acts of seeing and hearing into a form of dancing.

May 24, 2018 — Repertory Picks This Sunday afternoon, in Louisville, Kentucky, the Speed Art Museum will treat moviegoers to a free screening of Jacques Tati’s 1967 PlayTime, the third and final movie in the museum’s tip of the cap to the French auteur’s...

Nov 8, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled the...

Oct 29, 2014 — Anatomy of a Gag

Dec 17, 2008 — ANew Year’s treat from the Film Society of Lincoln Center: Jacques Tati’s supersized comic odyssey Playtime will be shown in its original, rarely screened 70 mm format at the Walter Reade Theater. If you haven’t seen this visionary work, which...

Oct 23, 2014 — The author recalls meeting the filmmaker in a Swedish hotel in the ’70s.

Nov 4, 2014 — In cinema history, there truly is no gag like a Tati gag.

Oct 30, 2014 — Tati’s witty visual comedy also functioned as satire of a rapidly modernizing postwar France.