Mikio Naruse was, throughout the 50s, an unflinching chronicler of the often miserable conditions facing people — women, especially — in post-war Japan. Late Chrysanthemums is a particularly harrowing example of this director's hyper-detailed, nuanced,
Werner Herzog's "documentaries" are generally known as strange, hybrid affairs, often incorporating nearly as much fictional material as his proper fiction features — thus, the common conceit of surrounding the word "documentary" with quotes when it's
Vendredi soir is not French director Claire Denis' best known or most critically lauded film, but it is her sweetest, her warmest, her most romantic, her most stripped down and simple, a purely sensual ode to desire and sex. The images of Denis' long-time
The final chapter of Eric Rohmer's "Four Seasons" cycle is Autumn Tale. Like the other films in the series, it takes its title as more than a mere invitation to set its story in a particular season; its evocation of autumn is concerned with the moods,
Hollywood films have always thrived on formula, and this is especially true of ongoing serials like the Thin Man series starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. The duo made six films together as the debonair, martini-swilling private detective Nick Charles
The title of Maurice Pialat's Police announces itself as a certain kind of genre picture, a thriller, a policier, and for at least part of its length it seems to be fulfilling the conventions of its genre. It opens with the police detective Louis Mangin
The pulp fiction villain Fantômas was one of the early cinema's first great criminal figures, as depicted in the famed five-film serial directed by Louis Feuillade. The first film in the series was Fantômas: In the Shadow of the Guillotine, which established
Werner Herzog's Where the Green Ants Dream is an oddity even in the filmography of a director who has more or less made nothing but oddities of various kinds. It's an elliptical, mystically infused tale of a confrontation between a tribe of Australian
I think I ruffled a few feathers not too long ago when I stated that "age was the enemy" on the post I did on Jimmy "J.J" Walker and Boy George, alluding to their rapid deterioration and alarming visages. Some said "It's not age, it's lifestyle!" True,
During his four decades in Hollywood, Howard Hawks worked on virtually every type of picture possible within the studio system of the time. Though he is today known primarily as a director of manically fast screwball comedies or rambling, low-key Westerns,
Hard-Nipple Nick is the hottest star, both bod-wise and at the box office. His wife’s figure and professional goings-on aren’t too shabby, either, as both Mr. and Mrs. Nick enjoy fame and fortune regularly up on the big screen—though his paychecks dwarf
[This review of a largely unknown and unavailable Jean-Luc Godard short is presented here as a plea that The Criterion Collection should include this film as an extra on one of their forthcoming Godard DVDs. It would be a very timely and appropriate
