Two graceful, intimate, and life-affirming documentaries pay tribute to the veterans of thriving music scenes in Cuba and Jamaica. Overflowing with relaxed vibes and rapturous tunes, the affectionate concert documentary INNA DE YARD captures a who’s who of Jamaican reggae legends as they reunite ...
You can’t spell funeral without “fun” in two boldly irreverent looks at the business of death. TAMPOPO director Juzo Itami’s fearlessly ribald debut feature plays like an anti-Ozu family portrait as it satirizes the chaotic clash between traditional and modern Japanese society that ensues when a ...
Hit the road with a pair of whirlwind journeys through Spain and Mexico infused with the ecstatic rebel spirit of youth. For his outlaw romance DEPRISA, DEPRISA, director Carlos Saura cast real-life street kids to tell the story of a pair of young lovers hurtling toward oblivion as they embark on...
The search for a stolen bike sets off vivid odysseys through Kingston and Rome in a definitive reggae classic and the Italian neorealist touchstone that inspired it. An almost documentary-like time capsule of the sights, sounds, and vibes of 1970s Jamaica, Theodoros Bafaloukos’s ROCKERS casts dru...
The late, great Dean Stockwell shows two sides—melancholy and soulful, then menacingly creepy—in a pair of 1980s art-house sensations. A former child actor, Stockwell began a remarkable late-career renaissance when Wim Wenders cast him in a key supporting role opposite Harry Dean Stanton and Nast...
Having fled Germany during the rise of Hitler’s regime, Fritz Lang went on to a remarkable second career in Hollywood, where he directed a string of hard-hitting anti-Nazi films in the 1940s that transcend propaganda with their expert craftsmanship and bleak air of noir fatalism. The first of the...
The hilariously misanthropic, perpetually drunken, notoriously child-hating W. C. Fields is the patron saint of curmudgeons everywhere. His cranky genius is on display in a pair of outrageous, very NSFWC comedy classics: the wild pre-Code Olympics satire MILLION DOLLAR LEGS—a nonstop barrage of s...
Two film versions of Lillian Hellman’s celebrated 1934 play “The Children’s Hour”—in which a vindictive boarding-school student sets off a devastating chain reaction by accusing two teachers of having a lesbian affair—offer fascinating insights into American moral panic and the art of adaptation....
Two luminous black-and-white road trips—one associate-produced by Wim Wenders, the other directed by him—trace aimless existential journeys across Britain, Europe, and America in the 1970s. Shot in cool monochrome by Wenders’s camera operator Martin Schäfer, Christopher Petit’s British cult class...
The magnetic Maggie Cheung lights up the screen in two mesmerizing metatextual works that deconstruct the nature of stardom. In Hong Kong New Wave master Stanley Kwan’s lush, kaleidoscopic biopic CENTER STAGE, Cheung embodies ill-fated screen siren Ruan Lingyu, who rose to fame as the “Greta Garb...
Fasten your seatbelts for a pair of white-knuckle road trips through treacherous terrain. Henri-Georges Clouzot set a new standard for screen suspense with his nonstop nerve-shredder THE WAGES OF FEAR, in which a quartet of desperate men face danger at every turn when they sign on to drive trucks...
Something sinister simmers beneath the summer sun when Alain Delon gets mixed up in murder in a pair of sultry, Mediterranean-set thrillers. The French actor with the steely blue gaze was at his most impossibly beautiful when he got his star-making breakthrough playing duplicitous charmer Tom Rip...
Spend Mother’s Day with two rich, illuminating explorations of the challenges women face in balancing the demands of motherhood with their complex, often hidden emotional lives. Drawing from the actor’s own letters, diary entries, photographs, and home movies, Stig Björkman’s revealing documentar...
The hit-man thriller gets a shot of postmodern cool in a pair of stylish crime dramas built around solitary, Zen heroes. A razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and Japanese lone-warrior mythology, Jean‑Pierre Melville’s LE SAMOURAÏ features a career-defining performance from Ala...
Master directors Wim Wenders and Joseph Losey paint sinister portraits of moral corruption in a pair of spellbinding, coolly stylized tales of unscrupulous art dealers embroiled in dangerous underworlds. Wenders’ gripping Patricia Highsmith adaptation THE AMERICAN FRIEND casts Dennis Hopper as th...
Kathleen Collins’s independent landmark LOSING GROUND is a luminous, brilliantly perceptive portrait of a marriage at a crossroads and a woman’s emotional awakening. One of the first films to explore black female desire with nuance and philosophical complexity, it contains a key allusion to actre...
Jean Renoir and Akira Kurosawa, two of cinema’s greatest directors, transform Maxim Gorky’s classic proletariat play “The Lower Depths” in their own ways for their own times. Renoir, working alongside the Popular Front in France while Hitler rose in Germany, took license with the dark nature of G...
Samuel Fuller and Orson Welles bring a mischievous sleight of hand to these slippery accounts of some of history’s most notorious scammers, cheats, and cons. Based on a stranger-than-fiction true story, Fuller’s offbeat western-noir gem THE BARON OF ARIZONA stars Vincent Price at his unctuous bes...
With his 1948 HAMLET, director-star Laurence Olivier created what remains the definitive screen version of the Bard’s venerable drama, a vividly cinematic, psychologically charged interpretation that garnered Oscars for both best picture and best actor. Less likely to win any awards is the hilari...
Jacques Demy’s candy-colored, enchantingly romantic musical THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG may not seem like an obvious pairing with a fast-and-furious swordplay spectacular filled with glinting blades and bloody vengeance. Nevertheless, LAST HURRAH FOR CHIVALRY’s director, John Woo, counts the swoon...
The fascinating and elusive matinee idol turned art-house actor Dirk Bogarde gives complex and morally ambiguous performances in both of these controversial, ahead-of-their-time dramas.
Two career criminals attempt to go straight, only to get sucked back into the underworld in Seijun Suzuki’s delirious pop-art spin on the yakuza genre and John Mackenzie’s gripping gangster film starring Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren.
No New York: Grifters and drifters make their way through the grime of early-eighties downtown bohemia.
Child actor John Howard Davies headlines two Brit-lit adaptations about the fickle fortunes of boyhood.
