Oct 12, 1987 — Akira Kurosawa’s thrilling Cinemascope epic is set squarely within the traditions of the Japanese film genre known as the “Chambara.”

Sep 15, 2016 — Need some respite from the twenty-four-hour news cycle? Bill Hader and Fred Armisen’s hysterical IFC Channel series Documentary Now! returns with some comedic salve for our weary election-season souls.

May 6, 2021 — Fame, as the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño once observed, is reductive. “Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished,” he wrote in 2666, an epic novel published after his death.What Bolaño identified as the...

Jul 7, 2020 — The renowned composer of well over four hundred film scores was equally at home in avant experimentation and tear-jerking sentimentality.

Sep 8, 2017 — “A complex and layered work, [Jonas Mekas’s] Lost Lost Lost [1976]—especially its first hour—is among cinema’s most poignant accounts of the immigrant experience,” writes Girish Shambu. “Historically, the best immigration cinema stages, in an astonishing multitude of ways, a divided...

Nov 9, 2017 — This year’s AFI Fest opens tonight in Los Angeles with Dee Rees’s Mudbound and was to have closed on November 16 with Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World—until Sony Pictures pulled it from the lineup in the wake...

Nov 27, 2008 — A genuine cause célèbre, adapted from Romain Gary’s 1970 nonfiction novel, Samuel Fuller’s late work is an unusually blunt and suggestively metaphoric account of American racism.

Oct 22, 2009 — The eighty-one-year-old Ennio Morricone has been composing hypnotic music for film since the early 1960s, for projects ranging from spaghetti westerns (his whistling, woodwindy five-note theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of the most recognizable...

Dec 6, 2013 — Ennio Morricone is known the world over for his instantly identifiable scores in such films as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; Once upon a Time in the West; and The Mission. He has composed hundreds of others, however,...

Nov 22, 1999 — Breathtaking, fastmoving, and overflowing with a delightfully self-mocking sense of humor, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is one of the most popular and influential Japanese films ever made. Released in 1954, this rip-snorting action-adventure epic about a sixteenth-century farm community led...