Feb 4, 2018 — Mexico’s “Three Amigos” are quite popular with the Directors Guild of America. Alejandro G. Iñárritu won the award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film in 2015 for Birdman, and then again in 2016 for The Revenant; earlier, in 2013,...

Nov 19, 2001 — Luis Buñuel’s drama is a seductive work that exemplifies, even as it studies, the perversity of human desire.

Jan 10, 2020 — How many times, in cultural history, has surrealism been declared out for the count? For the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing in 1929, surveying the surrealist literature of André Breton, Robert Desnos, and Louis Aragon, the glory days of this...

Aug 5, 2019 — At the San Francisco Silent Film Festival you can expect to see many great, even perfect, treasures of cinema, popular classics, and critical favorites. At the age of twenty-four, the event has become increasingly central to the silent cinema calendar—one...

Apr 22, 2020 — One of the true dark glories of the Czechoslovak New Wave, The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol, 1969) is the most popular and indelible work by the underappreciated Juraj Herz and remained a firm favorite of the director’s among his many films....

Nov 11, 2002 — Continued from Anatomy of a Love Festival - Part One The real turn-on, though, was the music—twenty-two hours of it, divided into solid chunks that usually ran more than thirty minutes. Friday night was the epitome of what San Francisco...

Apr 15, 2022 — This week we’re reading interviews with Mira Nair and Jane Schoenbrun, profiles of Viola Davis and Maggie Cheung, and an essay on Joan Micklin Silver.

Aug 18, 2011 — Stanley Kubrick’s labyrinthine 1956 heist flick The Killing—an exploded rethink of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and eventual template for the narrative convolutions of Reservoir Dog—became an instant facet in the jewel that was film noir, even as it refracted...

Jul 19, 2010 — “It is the most erotic film that I have ever made,” wrote Michael Powell of Black Narcissus. “It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image, from the beginning to the end.”

Oct 23, 2018 — Brian De Palma found his home in the psychological thriller with this chilling tale of murder, which twists genre conventions to investigate the perils of looking and the pitfalls of subjectivity.