"Departures" plays fair. It brings four main characters onstage (and the sweet old couple from a bath house). We know and understand them. We care about them. They are involved in an enterprise we probably knew nothing about. It touches on...

"Contact" is a film that takes place at the intersection of science, politics and faith. Those are three subjects that don't always fit easily together. In the film, an alien intelligence transmits an image of three pages of encrypted...

There is a purity to the John Ford style. His composition is classical. He arranges his characters within the frame to reflect power dynamics--or sometimes to suggest a balance is changing. His magnificent Western landscapes are always...

I wouldn't think of giving away the game. The writing and editing are the keys to how this film never seems to be the deceptive assembly that it is, but appears to be proceeding on schedule, whatever that schedule is. We accept even action...

The two parts of Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible" are epic in scope, awesome in visuals, and nonsensical in story. It is one of those works that has proceeded directly to the status of Great Movie without going through the intermediate...

The film is entirely about adultery. Most unusual for Bergman, it is a comedy. It flirts at times with screwball, but chooses more decisively to use the kind of verbal wit that Shaw and Wilde employed.

It would be wrong for me to reveal the details of the story Tsugumo tells. What I can say is that it is heartbreaking. He explains that Motome was not a man trying to avoid death by the excuse of asking for a delay. He was a man whose...

"Diary of a Lost Girl" was the close of her glory days. It's not the equal of "Pandora's Box," but her performance is on the same high level. It has a frankness that would largely disappear from mainstream films after the rise of...

We are watching a seduction. Despite our expectations that lesbianism is possible, it isn't sexual, but has to do with power. Jeanne senses a weakness in Sophie, a secret, and perhaps believes she can make the other young woman her...

To watch a film like this, or any Rohmer film, creates a sense of peaceful regard in me. He isn't afraid of losing my attention with too much dialogue, or too little action. He invites me to arrive at my own moral judgments.

It is universally agreed that Jean Renoir was one of the greatest of all directors, and he was also one of the warmest and most entertaining. "Grand Illusion" and "Rules of the Game" are routinely included on lists of the greatest films,...

"The Pledge" may be Nicholson's finest performance. Here are none of the familiar signals of his more popular performances, none of the relish of characterization, none of the sardonic remove. We see a lonely man, aging, whose attempts to...

Viewing Hiyao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away" for the third time, I was struck by a quality between generosity and love. On earlier viewings I was caught up by the boundless imagination of the story. This time I began to focus on the elements...

Varda is sometimes referred to as the godmother of the French New Wave. I have been guilty of that myself. Nothing could be more unfair. Varda is its very soul, and only the fact that she is a woman, I fear, prevented her from being...

Here is the saddest film I have ever seen about the life of a woman. It begins on a chill dawn when the heroine wanders, her face behind a fan, until encountering some of her fellow prostitutes. "It's hard for a 50-year-old women to pass...

It's well known that David Lynch's "Mulholland Dr." was assembled from the remains of a cancelled TV series, with the addition of some additional footage filmed later. That may be taken by some viewers as a way to explain the film's...

“The Spirit of the Beehive” is one of only three features and a short subject directed by Erice (born 1940). Like such films as Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter” (1955), it is a masterpiece that can only cause us to wonder what...

Rainer Werner Fassbinder premiered "Veronika Voss" in February 1982, at the Berlin Film Festival. It was hailed as one of the best of his 40 films. Late on the night of June 9, 1982, he made a telephone call from Munich to Paris to tell...

Patrice Leconte's "Monsieur Hire" is a tragedy about loneliness and erotomania, told about two solitary people who have nothing else in common. It involves a murder, and the opening shot is of a corpse. Monsieur Hire is a scrawny, balding...

"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens up between its origins in the kabuki style and its subject of starvation in a mountain village!...