Ghost Dog as International Sampler
In his final film of the twentieth century, Jim Jarmusch evokes the tragic weight of history while also anticipating the mythical identities of a social-media-saturated future.
Good Morning: Structures and Strictures in Suburbia
Yasujiro Ozu’s ode to childhood interweaves observations of human behavior with the simple surfaces of quotidian life in Tokyo.
The Immortal Story: Divas and Dandies
Set in nineteenth-century Macao, Orson Welles’s adaptation of a classic tale by Isak Dinesen is a hypnotic meditation on the pitfalls of storytelling.
Jacques Tati: Composing in Sound and Image
What you hear is as crucial—and as funny—as what you see in Tati’s films.
F for Fake: Orson Welles’s Purloined Letter
The Young Girls of Rochefort: Not the Same Old Song and Dance
Everyday life gets a musical makeover in Jacques Demy’s tale of chance and love, a film of exquisitely sad happiness.
L’eclisse: A Vigilance of Desire
Gertrud and Light in August
Crumb Reconsidered
Germany Year Zero: The Humanity of the Defeated
The Dance of Playtime
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.
High and Low: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible
Personal Effects: The Guarded Intimacy of Sans Soleil
Chris Marker’s masterpiece is a cinematic essay and travel film made up of asides and digressions that form a portrait of late twentieth-century civilization.
WR, Sex, and the Art of Radical Juxtaposition
Between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, it was generally felt among Western intellectuals and cinephiles that cutting-edge, revolutionary cinema came from Western Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Among the touchstones were Jean-Luc Goda
…Reasons for Kicking and Screaming
A key Gen-X comedy about postgraduate angst, Noah Baumbach’s debut feature is an uproarious union of wit and trauma.
Jean Renoir’s Trilogy of Spectacle
Movie trilogies can be created by either filmmakers or critics. When Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote and directed The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Arabian Nights (1973), he made no bones about calling them his Trilogy of Life. But whe
…The White Sheik
Federico Fellini both identifies with and satirizes the provinciality that forms his romantic comedy's central subject.
Figuring Out Day of Wrath
Carl Dreyer’s 17th-century period piece leaves all major questions frustratingly unresolved yet vibrantly open, quivering and radiant with life and meaning.