One of the best films ever made about the innate absurdities of moviemaking, "Night" is a loving satire about the film-world family filled with marvelously nutty performances, tons of movie references, and an ...

Wong is a master of melancholic style and romantic longing, and in this spare, elegant film—one of his first features—he creates an atmosphere of blissful yearning. Yuddy searches in vain for his mother; Su pines for ...

Like a North African version of Glory, this Academy Award-nominee for Best Foreign Language Film shines a harsh light on a nearly-forgotten chapter of history. Days’ outstanding ensemble performances were collectively ...

Hailed for his poetic debut "Badlands," Malick returned five years later with a film every bit as innovative and dreamlike. As adversaries in love with the same woman, the male leads are outstanding, with Gere's ...

A downbeat love story pickled in bile and booze, this melodrama of addiction by the great Blake Edwards skirts the same terrain as "Lost Weekend" without ever getting preachy. Instead, Edwards examines the sullied yet ...

This true-to-life, intelligent, often hilarious movie wins you over with its sheer exuberance and dead-on recreation of the wild and wooly seventies. Director Linklater satirizes the period with considerable affection, ...

Based on a stage play by Sidney Kingsley and scripted by playwright Lillian Hellman, Wyler's gritty, compelling fable of tenement life in the 1930s was touted in its day as a hard-hitting social drama about class ...

Adapted from Sister Helen Prejean's non-fiction book by actor/director Tim Robbins, "Dead Man Walking" is an intense, harrowing account of one woman's dogged attempt to assure spiritual (if not earthly) redemption for a ...

This tingling, literate British chiller gradually builds a sense of dread, emanating from the pit of the stomach.Though Rod Serling is not around to confirm it, this could have inspired his wildly inventive Twilight ...

Riveting, shocking, and heart-achingly poignant, Kuenne’s “Dear Zachary” burrows into an almost unbearably bleak and complicated murder case that is part true crime, part thriller, and part posthumous tribute. Kuenne ...

Despite never getting the chance to complete his Emmy Award-winning Death in Gaza, James Miller still managed to create one of the most unbiased and unflinching accounts of the long-standing, seemingly insoluble ...

Luchino's resplendent adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella is a sumptuous feast for the eyes, with its meticulous period detail, lavish costumes, and decorative sets. Yet the themes of death and decay are ever-present, ...

Although it owes a debt to Hitchcock and American pulp fiction, Bardem’s elegant, noirish thriller is a poison dart aimed at the double scourge of class privilege and social hypocrisy in Franco’s Spain. Bardem, an ...

When people talk about "the death of film," they're usually referring to the new onslaught of digital movies. Morrison's fascinating film is really an elegy to the majesty of celluloid as a physical object, and its ...

Prolific writer/director Allen risks a measure of self-deconstruction with every neurotic, semi-autobiographical character he plays, but here he gives his story (and his alter-go) some extra coarseness and bite, which ...

One of the most inventive comedies to come along in the last 20 years, Jeunet and Caro's black-comic satire isn't just weird and wildly imaginative, it's also a tender love story, with Dougnac and Pinon making ...

Of course there is something grotesque and horrifying about O'Grady, now living safely in exile in Ireland thanks to the exertions of his superiors, but how remorseful can we really expect a sociopath who viciously ...

A potent action film with potent doses of suspense and terror, "Deliverance" also functions as a first-rate psychological drama which explores dualities in our natures: who we are in our normal "civilized" lives versus ...

After a roughly ten-year decline in popularity and output (during which time Kurosawa attempted suicide), the master rose again in this stunning Russian-language film, co-produced by the Soviets. Based on a real-life ...

Guitry, already a famous playwright in France before turning to movies in the 1930s, put his keen ear for dialogue and razor-sharp humor to good use in his filmmaking forays. These four works, all produced within a ...