They’re the kind of girls your mother warned you about . . . The legendary Louise Brooks became the ultimate flapper icon with her magnetic turn in G. W. Pabst’s silent masterpiece Pandora’s Box, in which she plays a man-eating showgirl whose wayward hedonism leaves ruin in its wake. Six decades ...
Silver-tongued charlatans come bearing hidden motives in these subversive, fire-and-brimstone exposés of religious hypocrisy and chicanery. Richard Brooks’s powerful adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s controversial novel “Elmer Gantry” stars an Oscar-winning Burt Lancaster, in one of his greatest rol...
It’s a match made in screwball heaven! René Clair’s ebulliently inventive supernatural romance I MARRIED A WITCH stars Veronica Lake at her saucy best as a seductive sorceress who uses her hex appeal to get revenge on a hapless Fredric March. The film’s original producer (who ultimately left the ...
Ernst Lubitsch’s beloved holiday-time charmer THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER—starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as coworkers who can barely stand each other even as they unwittingly fall in love through anonymous correspondence—has spawned many remakes and homages, including this rosily nos...
A ubiquitous presence throughout the Warner Bros. films of the 1930s, Joan Blondell had a brassy charm that was perfectly suited to the pre-Code era, when chiselers, good-time girls, and wisecracking dames were screen staples. She’s at her sassy, scene-stealing best playing world-wise showgirls i...
The hands of fate grip like a vise in two of master director Fritz Lang’s darkest journeys through the lower depths, each revolving around paintings and starring the crackerjack noir trio of Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea. First, Robinson plays an artist mixed up in a web of dec...
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...
Shape-shifting Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier burst onto the scene with these compassionate, richly psychological character studies, the first two films in his planned “Oslo Trilogy” (the last installment of which is currently in production). Bristling with nervy energy, his feature debut, REPRIS...
In 1972, Perry Henzell put Jamaican cinema on the map with his landmark cult classic THE HARDER THEY COME, a Robin Hood–esque crime fable starring legendary musician Jimmy Cliff that went on to become a phenomenon in its home country. Henzell’s long-lost sophomore feature, NO PLACE LIKE HOME, was...
A loose remake of Herk Harvey’s legendary surrealist nightmare CARNIVAL OF SOULS, Christian Petzold’s acclaimed metaphysical thriller YELLA similarly follows a woman who, after surviving a car accident, finds herself adrift in a haunted world—in this case, the soulless corporate limbo of post-reu...
For her gorgeous, minutely observed exploration of family bonds 35 SHOTS OF RUM, Claire Denis was inspired by one of Yasujiro Ozu’s most masterful domestic dramas—in which the relationship between a widowed father and his devoted daughter is complicated by the arrival of an attractive young man—t...
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.
Environmental threats hang over these two atmospheric mood pieces. Antonioni’s first color film evokes the creeping malaise that comes with industrialization, while the apocalypse itself looms nigh in Peter Weir’s beguiling mystery.
The American author Patricia Highsmith’s dark, violent writing provides the source material for these two edgy European thrillers.
These ultracool, stylish studies of gambling addiction and life on the fringes are a pair of aces.
Kon Ichikawa delivers a black comedy about sexual dysfunction and a gender-bending revenge thriller.
Beware a devil in disguise in these stylishly imaginative satanic fantasies. The great Michel Simon plays an aging alchemist who strikes a deal with the Prince of Darkness (also played by Simon) in exchange for eternal youth in René Clair’s BEAUTY AND THE DEVIL, a marvel of dark wit and invention...
Watch David Lean’s classic adaptation after Terence Davies’s moving THE LONG DAY CLOSES—which references Charles Dickens’s novel.
Inspectors Maigret and Murakami are on the case in Paris and Tokyo in these detective stories inspired by Georges Simenon’s crime fiction.
