Fritz Lang and Peter Lorre accomplish a remarkable feat in M (1931). They humanize child murderer Hans Beckert. Suspenseful, drenched in tragedy, M brings the audience through Beckert’s harrowing final days as he evades both police and the criminal underground. Beckert’s frantic efforts to escape the tightening noose echo Read More …
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s celebrated feature-length debut is a story about two brothers who must decide whether to trust the stranger who suddenly arrives in their home claiming to be their father. As the sons argue about how to respond, they follow this stranger out on what Read More …
Despite its reputation as the picture that undeservedly beat Citizen Kane for Best Picture and Director Academy Awards, How Green Was My ValleyM remains a stirring and vital portrait of a close-knit community in all its glory—and all its failings. Seen through the eyes of a boy approaching manhood, Read More …
My Life to Live (1961) opens with a series of closeups of Nana (Anna Karina)—her left profile, her face straight on, her right profile, and then, in the first dramatic scene of the film, a two-minute shot of the back of her head, as she breaks Read More …
Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) has been wandering in the desert for some four years at the beginning of Paris, Texas, and it shows. His suit is so begrimed with dust that it’s hard to tell what color it originally was, and in his eyes is Read More …
If, as they say, writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then how does one describe a film like Koyaanisqatsi (1983), which has no actors, no dialogue, and no plot, but consists instead of nothing but music and images (some of which, incidentally, do happen to Read More …
“A man can be whatever he wants, you said.” “I’m sorry. I thought it was true.” Sitting in a darkened theater for four hours watching Lawrence of Arabia makes me feel like I’ve lived another life (even though the period of Lawrence’s life depicted in Read More …
A useful starting point when approaching Friedrich Wilhelm (F. W.) Murnau’s Faust is Rembrandt’s 1652 etching of the same name. In it, we see Faust alone in his library, poring through parchments, surrounded on all sides by scientific paraphernalia. But Rembrandt pays little attention to the things in Read More …
In her essay “Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson,” Susan Sontag argues that “All of Bresson’s films have a common theme: the meaning of confinement and liberty.” A Man Escaped develops this theme more explicitly than in any other of his works, making it the Read More …
A film that has often invited comparisons to A Man for All Seasons (Top 100 #31), Becket is also the story of a high official in Britain who chooses God over king and is slain for his beliefs. Thomas Becket begins the movie as the king’s closest friend, and Read More …