Editing is the key to the cinema of Alain Resnais, the crux of his work. Through the cut, the filmmaker controls the flow of space and time,...
Four Maurice Pialat shorts, 1951-1958
The early work of a director is often an instructive glimpse into the development of the sensibility that would go on to inform his or her m...
La femme infidèle
It is already apparent from the first few moments of Claude Chabrol's La femme infidèle that this film will be concerned with domesticit...
Easy Virtue
[This post is a teaser for the third annual For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which will be running from May 13-18. This year, ...
Seven Chances
Seven Chances was, unlike his previous features, not a project of Buster Keaton's own choosing. It was selected by producer Joseph M. Sc...
Certified Copy
There is a small, unobtrusive scene in Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy that provides a neat synecdoche for this puzzling, ambiguous, e...
School Daze
Spike Lee's second feature, School Daze, is a fictionalized reflection of the director's experiences at the historically black Moreh...
The Sleeping Beauty
Catherine Breillat understands very well the appeal and the power of fairy tales and children's stories, their ability to reflect and cr...
Bluebeard (2009)
Catherine Breillat's films have often been concerned with childhood and innocence, especially the loss of girlish innocence, often with ...
The Rape of the Vampire
Jean Rollin's first feature, The Rape of the Vampire, establishes virtually all of the templates for this trash auteur's distinctive...
The Draughtsman's Contract
The nature of power, as played out through a sexual and economic game of class, property and inheritance, is the somewhat obscured subject o...
Persian Series 1-3/Chinese Series
Stan Brakhage's painted films are extraordinarily difficult to write about. These films, more even than Brakhage's films utilizing p...
M (1951)
Fritz Lang's M is such an enduring classic that it's hard to imagine a Hollywood remake of it, but that's exactly what director ...
M (1931)
Fritz Lang's M was the director's first sound film, and the penultimate film he made in Germany before emigrating to the USA, fleein...
Hangman's House
John Ford's Hangman's House is an overlooked expressionist classic from the director's silent era, a moody and evocative melodra...
Les bonnes femmes
Les Bonnes Femmes was Claude Chabrol's fourth feature, but in many ways it feels like his true debut, the first of his films in which hi...
Shirin
The immersive, emotional power of the cinema is the subject of Abbas Kiarostami's formal experiment Shirin, in which the director focuse...
Phantom
Though F.W. Murnau immediately followed his iconic vampire tale Nosferatu with a film called Phantom, there is nothing supernatural about th...
The Woman in the Window
Fritz Lang's 1944 noir The Woman in the Window is in many ways a meta-noir that examines the tragic allure that draws so many doomed noi...
The Navigator
In The Navigator, Buster Keaton plays Rollo Treadway, a wealthy society heir with a very unsentimental idea of love. He simply decides one d...
La Chienne
Bleak, tragic, affecting, and at times surprisingly humorous, Jean Renoir's La Chienne is the melancholy tale of a poor schlub who gets ...