Kinoshita’s 1958 restaging of a harrowing Japanese folk tradition is at once stylistically theatrical and emotionally authentic.
The film is one of the purest distillations of a charismatic personality’s diverse artistic nature.
This handsome, expertly curated collection rescues from certain fate three of Russian master Aleksandr Sokurov’s greatest films.
The decade extending from the mid-’60s onward was, in general, one of transition for a Japanese film industry concluding its golden age.
Gainsborough Pictures took the melodrama to heights yet untouched with a series of audacious, preposterous tales of treachery and deceit
The original version of Little Shop of Horrors is finally allowed to run rampant over expectations and popular discretion, as intended.
Carné’s subversive medieval fable de l’amour remains one of cinema’s great paeans to everlasting love.
A pair of films by two of Japan’s most aesthetically radical cult directors have given me pause.
Manoel de Oliveira has mostly sidestepped the perils of the productive by falling into a satisfying pattern of major and minor works.
The fearless documentation of the enterprise is the heart-stopping cinematic analogue to the crew’s real-world peril.
Room 237 is more companion piece than standalone work.
Thematic preoccupations are what make individual filmmakers so intriguing as one steps back to examine certain artist’s entire careers.
Passion utilizes its parent film’s narrative of corporate betrayal as mere framework for which De Palma to dress in all kinds of lustrous detail.
Frances Ha feels like an unusually intimate, personal piece, a return to Noah Baumbach’s early, more naïvely optimistic phase.
There’s a palpable sense of both anger and sympathy on the part of Wang for the plight of his subjects.
One of the most honest and detailed documents of the mid-’60s mod subculture in existence.
Jack Black gives a career-best performance in an effortlessly entertaining film.
Criterion gives one of last year’s finest films an excellent transfer, finally bringing Aki Kaurismäki into the high-definition landscape.
The film is one of the major masterpieces of the young decade thus far.
Augmented by a strong selection of extras, this is now the definitive version of the ’70s cult classic in the digital realm.