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Eric Rohmer's intelligent, minimally plotted, dialogue-dominated films usually center on the lives and especially the loves of contemporary youth. This restrained, buoyant, and at moments self-indulgent 1981 film focuses on [...]

In his long and venerable career, Sidney Lumet made two of the best films capturing the essence of NYC's corrupt police ethos--Serpico (1973) and Prince of the City (1981). Serpico [...]

Chris Menges's A World Apart (1988) is primarily seen through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old white, middle-class girl, Molly (Johdi May), whose parents are radicals in repressive, racist Sixties South [...]

Reinhard HaufFs Knife in the Head (1978) is set in West Germany during a time when leftwing terrorist violence (e.g., Bader-Meinhoff) threatens the established order. The film's protagonist, Hoffmann, is [...]

Diane is not the film one would expect from Kent Jones, director of documentaries such as Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (2007), A Letter to Elia (with Martin [...]

Me and Cineaste by Robert Cashill My 'first time' with Cineaste was in high school, at The Happy Booker bookstore in Morris Plains, NJ. I don't recall which issue it [...]

A friend and former student of the late Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda uncovers parallels in his life and art in a discussion about Afterimage, the director's final film, and what [...]

This imaginative and symbolic 1971 film by Miklos Jancso is set during the 1919 communist revolution in Hungary led by Bela Kun, which lasted 133 days before being suppressed by [...]

Most discerning filmgoers have seen the films of pre-1968 Czech New Wave directors such as Milos Forman, Jan Nemec, Jin Menzel, Ivan Passer, and Vera Chytilova. Though Slovakia was united [...]

In his long and distinguished film career, Mike Leigh has made over twenty films. Most of them, like two of my favorites, the very dark and disconsolate Naked (1993) and [...]

Pawel Pawlikowski started out as a documentarian and won the Grierson Award for the Best British Documentary in 1995 with his absurdist Tripping with Zhirinovsky, a surreal boat journey down [...]

At once both a realistic and a phantasmagoric depiction of an everyday bureaucratic, life-after-death limbo, After Life (1998) was Hirokazu Kore-eda's breakthrough work. He imagines a realm where the dead [...]

In Zeshawn Ali's documentary, the reflective, religious Hanif--a middle-aged, gaunt, graybearded ex-con--rebuilds his life working as a casket maker and a ritual body washer. He does so in a marginal [...]

One of Mike Leigh's most critically praised and commercially successful films, Secrets & Lies (1996) is particularly adept in its treatment of relationships. Both major and minor characters are subtly [...]

Before WWII, Jews comprised ten percent of the population of Poland. By the end of the war, of the 3.3 million Jews who lived in Poland before the war, only [...]

In the 1970s Bob Leuci played a key role as an informant who took down one of the most corrupt New York City police units. Magnus Skatvold and Greg Mall's [...]

Iranian American Ramin Bahrani's downbeat, neorealist, low-budget film focuses on one Pakistani immigrant's story. Ahmad, a former Pakistani pop star, sells coffee and bagels from one of those ubiquitous carts [...]

Lebanon brings a first-time filmmaker face-to-face with his war-scarred past as the member of a tank crew during Israel's 1982 invasion, In recent years Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon has [...]

Joseph Cedar is a talented, young Israeli director who had directed two films--a thriller, Time of Favor (2000) and a film about the world of religious Zionist settlers, Campfire (2004)--before [...]

Early Bergman Eclipse Series 1, a box set of five DVDs, including Torment (B&W, 101 mins., 1944), Crisis (B&W, 93 mins., 1946), Port of Call (B&W, 97 mins., 1948), Thirst(B&W, [...]

Sidney Lumet has been making memorable motion pictures for fifty years. His forty-three feature films have won over fifty Academy Award nominations, including four nominations for Best Director and another [...]

On a brief visit in the late Seventies to the South Bronx block where I grew up, I painfully saw only a few buildings standing on a silent, rubblefilled street. [...]

This 1985 film is part of Istvan Szabo's loosely linked historical trilogy, along with Mephisto (1981) and Hanussen (1988). All three films star the mesmerizing Klaus Maria Brandauer, an actor [...]

This stirring documentary short profiles an inner city St. Louis state representative, Bruce Franks Jr., who was politically activated by the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. Franks is [...]

As a college student in the Fifties, I sat in the dark watching, with uncritical admiration, such films as Sawdust and Tinsel, The Seventh Seal, and Wild Strawberries. Along with [...]

Some of Joseph Losey's best work was done in collaboration with Harold Pinter as screenwriter: The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), and, of course, Accident (1967). Set in Oxford, the [...]

Manfried Kirchheimer's film consists of documentary footage he and friend Walter Hess shot in New York between 1958 and 1960. He has turned it into a poetic film devoid of [...]

Ealing Studios' characteristic idiosyncratic coziness and optimism is turned into something darker and more incisively satiric in this film. Along with Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Man in [...]

Produced by Roman Polanski, Robert Benmussa and Alain Sarde; directed by Roman Polanski; screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the book by Wladyslaw Szpilman; cinematography by Pawel Edelman; production design [...]

Produced by Lars Jonsson; directed and written by Lukas Moodysson; cinematography by Ulf Brantas; production design by Anna Malini Ahlberg; edited by Michal Leszczylowski and Frerik Abrahamsen; art direction by [...]

While Woody Allen's films have for years won great critical acclaim and delighted audiences worldwide, attention has rarely been focused on his patronizing treatment of female characters or on the [...]

Richard Price first burst onto the literary scene in 1974 with his novel The Wanderers, an episodic account of the world of a teenage gang cum social club in the [...]

Israeli writer-director Joseph Cedar's first three films, the Oscar-nominated war film about the 2000 South Lebanon conflict, Beaufort (2007), and his Time of Favor (2000) and Campfire (2004)--both box-office hits [...]

Kelly Reichardt's Western, Meek's Cutoff, may have a bigger budget (seven figures) and a better-known cast than her three previous feature films--River of Grass (1994), Old Joy (2006), and Wendy [...]

Jim Jarmusch's films are always idiosyncratic, often tending to a melancholy comic tone, exemplified here by Bill Murray at his deadpan, slightly ironic best. He's the film's central figure, Don [...]

Robert Altman: The Oral Biography by Mitchell Zuckoff. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2009. 560 pp., illus. Hardcover: $35.00. When the visionary and iconoclastic director Robert Altman died at eighty-one [...]

This seems an odd film for Sidney Lumet to have directed--a slick, watchable soap opera adapted from Mary McCarthy's best-selling, supposedly shocking novel. Rather than one of Lumet's usually male-centered [...]

It's apt that (Jncaste. a magazine dedicated to cinema that matters, was born in a year that generated so many influential films. Let's take a look back at some of [...]

Half Nelson Produced by Jamie Patricof, Alex Orlovsky, Lynette Howell, Anna Boden; directed by Ryan Fleck; written by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden; cinematography by Andrij Parekh; edited by Anna [...]

Writer-director Noah Baumbach's first two films, Kicking and Screaming (1995) and Mr. Jealousy (1998), were comic, and perceptive, evocations of male-female relationships. But in their treatment of the behavior between [...]

Produced by Milos Stejskal; directed by Jaromil Jires; screenplay by Milan Kundera, Jaromil Jires, and Zdenek Blaha; cinematography by Jan Curik; edited by Joseph Valusiak; original music by Zdenek Pololanik: [...]

Produced by Simon Channing-Williams; directed and written by Mike Leigh; cinematography by Dick Poe; edited by Lesley Walker; music by Andrew Dickson; production design by Eve Stewart; costume design by [...]

Directed by John Schlesinger; screenplay by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall; cinematography by Denys Coop; music by Richard Rodney Bennett; edited by Roger Cherrill; starring Tom Courtenay, Julie Christie, Wilfred [...]

by James Sanders. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. 496 pp., illus. Hardcover: $45.00. For Hollywood, New York is 'the city'-- the physically and emotionally overwhelming site where lives are [...]

Produced by Alain Sarde and Marin Karmitz; written and directed by Michael Haneke; cinematography by Jurgen Jurges; production design by Manu de Chauvigny; edited by Andreas Prochaska and Karin Hartusch; [...]

Cristian Mungiu's Graduation is shot simply and naturalistically in long takes and wide shots. Its focus is on Romeo (Adrian Titieni), a solemn, bearish, middle-aged doctor, who anxiously pushes his [...]

This 1968 film is slightly more intimate than Miklos Jancso's usual, more epic work, but with all his distinctive formal strategies intact: the long flowing takes capturing people in motion, [...]

Martin Scorsese made one of his best films by faithfully and elegantly adapting Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Age of Innocence. It turns out to be a perfect fit [...]

Produced by Paul Reisman; written and directed by Paul Schrader; based on the novel by Russell Banks; cinematography by Paul Sarossy; production design by Anne Pritchard; edited by Jay Rabinowitz; [...]

Paul Schrader is one of the few American directors who began his career as a film critic, publishing the well-regarded Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer in 1972. In [...]