Gone fishing: the documentarian talks about his first feature in over a decade, an emotionally devastating and intricately ...

Time is a formidable enemy in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and thus it’s appropriate that its scenes, shot in handheld cinemascope, are built around prolonged, pitilessly unblinking ...

1. Johnny Guitar Nicholas Ray, 1954 2. Mouchette Robert Bresson, 1967 3. Laura Otto Preminger, 1944 4. Barry Lyndon Stanley Kubrick, 1975 5. Muriel Alain ...

The movie starts with the usual sci-fi tropes: mankind’s experiments go haywire with destructive results. The epidemic begins with chimps infected with “rage” (as part of research into what we presume ...

Land of the Pharaohs (1955, Howard Hawks). When I first saw it, as a kid, Land of the Pharaohs became my favorite film. I’d always been addicted to historical epics, but this one was different: it ...

The story of Third World Cinema Corporation—a fledging production house founded by Black and Latino artists in 1971—is at once inspirational and heartbreaking. An earnest “for us, by us” effort to ...

Swooping across sparkling azure waters, the first shots of Neil Jordan’s Ondine envision Ireland amid a sea bubbling with ancient mystical forces. When the camera settles on the boat of a glum-faced, ...

On Actor Directors: Selfishly, being an actor, I think it helps to have a director with an acting background. Too many of the young directors are obsessed with celluloid—obsessed with making beautiful ...

Taxi Driver has a lot of negative aspects, but it would be silly to shrug off its baroque visuals and its high-class actor, Robert De Niro, whose acting range is always underscored by a personal ...

Why do contemporary American documentaries tend to shy away from the character ambiguities that are so productive for fictional cinema? Is it that the talking heads who inhabit these films happen to ...

Documenting a road trip undertaken by one of the most plausibly despicable brother-sister pairings in all of cinema, Alex Ross Perry’s second feature The Color Wheel is an astonishing work of pathos ...

Camera comes in low over an immense Western lake, its destination apparently a small island at the center that seems to consist of nothing but treetops. Draw nearer, then sweep over and pass the ...