The Tree of Life: Let the Wind Speak
The imitation of nature becomes a devotional act in Terrence Malick’s cinema, which reaches sublime heights in this exploration of childhood, memory, and grief.
Revenge: The Long Road Home
Suffused with a quiet radiance, this Kazakh New Wave masterpiece grapples with cultural displacement through an allegorical tale of vengeance.
The Squid and the Whale: 4 Way Street
In his deeply personal third feature, Noah Baumbach charts a family’s dissolution against the backdrop of 1980s literary Brooklyn.
A Poem Is a Naked Person: I Shall Be Released
Les Blank’s long-lost documentary revels in the trippy, eccentric world of and surrounding Tulsa Sound pioneer Leon Russell, transforming what might have been a standard concert movie into a genuine work of art.
Inside Llewyn Davis: The Sound of Music
Inside Llewyn Davis takes its protagonist on a Hero’s Journey of characteristically Coen-esque proportions—a voyage at turns serious and comic, and framed by an exquisitely curated selection of folk melodies.
Hiroshima mon amour: Time Indefinite
The Friends of Eddie Coyle: They Were Expendable
Peter Yates's crime drama is a haunting, singular experience, brutal and minutely observed, with a remarkably authentic sense of place.
Overlord: A Soldier for All Seasons
World Cinema Project: Recalled to Life
The critic and WCP executive director offers a personal take on art cinema and a primer on the project’s scope and mission.
A Woman Under the Influence: The War at Home
Approaching Shoah
How Claude Lanzmann made a thoughtful film about the unthinkable and unfilmable.
3:10 to Yuma: Curious Distances
Delmer Daves’s classic western is psychologically probing, magnificently shot, and fascinatingly ambiguous.
Jubal: Awakened to Goodness
Delmer Daves’s visually majestic, emotionally charged western finds its drama in the decency of its characters.
Two-Lane Blacktop: Slow Ride
Rosetta: Radical Economy
The camera never stops moving in the Dardenne brothers’ portrait of a troubled teenage girl desperate for a job.
La promesse: One Plus One
The Dardennes threw down the gauntlet for a new type of unadorned dramatic storytelling with their breakthrough tale of a working-class boy’s fraught coming-of-age.
The Royal Tenenbaums: Faded Glories
Three Popular Films by Jean-Pierre Gorin
Dazed and Confused: Dream On
The film is made up of a succession of small visions, observed and executed with apparent ease but thought through with such exquisite care and attention that the experience becomes overwhelming.
Yi Yi: Time and Space
In Yang’s cinema in general, and in Yi Yi in particular, character and environment are inseparable.
Five Easy Pieces: The Solitude
Black Narcissus: Empire of the Senses
Summer Hours: A Time to Live and a Time to Die
In this beautiful portrait of a French family, Olivier Assayas is stoically removed yet lovingly attentive to his characters’ vanities, idiosyncrasies, and reserves of goodwill.