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AFONYA (Georgi Daneliya, 1975) 3 Apr 2013 | 05:23 am
A Soviet tragicomedy written wonderfully well by Aleksandr Borodyanskiy and directed by Georgi Daneliya at a fast clip, at least in its urban phase, Afonya charts the slippage into regretfulness of an...
ZERO DARK THIRTY (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012) 31 Mar 2013 | 09:36 pm
Solemn, fierce and combustible, Zero Dark Thirty, about the C.I.A.’s search to kill al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, is one heck of a thriller. It is a simple revenge plot—bin Laden masterminded the 9...
NO PATH THROUGH FIRE (Gleb Panfilov, 1967) 31 Mar 2013 | 07:43 am
The same year as the enormously expensive, spectacular War and Peace (Sergei Bondarchuk, 1967), another war film emerged from the U.S.S.R.—this one, modest, in black and white, and twenty times better...
THE MAN WHO LIES (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1968) 27 Mar 2013 | 09:45 pm
Writer-director Alain Robbe-Grillet’s L’homme qui ment—essential viewing, this—begins in a wooded expanse as a youngish man, nicely dressed, pursued by armed soldiers, ducks behind trees to avoid thei...
TIME OF THE GYPSIES (Emir Kusturíca, 1988) 26 Mar 2013 | 10:34 am
Dazzlingly made by Emir Kusturíca (best director, Cannes), Dom za vešanje (which is in Serbian)—literally, Home for Hanging—is a gripping, engrossing Yugoslavian melodrama about Perhan, who descends i...
THE CREATURES (Agnès Varda, 1966) 25 Mar 2013 | 06:29 am
Writer-director Agnès Varda’s playful Les créatures sparkles and captivates. It is one of those works where we’re not always sure what is real and what is being imagined, especially since the protagon...
BLOOD RELATIVES (Claude Chabrol, 1978) 24 Mar 2013 | 09:26 am
A co-production of France and Canada, Blood Relatives (Les liens de sang) is set in Montreal. Adapted from an Ed McBain novel by Claude Chabrol and Sydney Banks, the plot involves a brutal murder cros...
ALICE, OR THE LAST ESCAPADE (Claude Chabrol, 1976) 23 Mar 2013 | 09:23 am
“It’s useless to ask questions, for there are no answers.” “You cannot escape your fate.” Dedicated to Fritz Lang, who had died earlier that year, writer-director Claude Chabrol’s Alice ou la derni...
DARK IS THE NIGHT (Boris Barnet, 1944) 22 Mar 2013 | 12:15 am
Boris Banet began by making silent films, and the prologue of Odnazhdy Nochyu (alternately called in English Once at Night and Dark Is the Night), a wartime sound film, is mysteriously, frighteningly ...
THE THEME (Gleb Panfilov, 1979) 19 Mar 2013 | 10:14 am
A Chekhovian tragicomedy, Gleb Panfilov’s Tema, co-written by Panfilov and Aleksandr Chervinsky, follows Moscowite Kim Esenin, a popular though increasingly superficial and “conformist” playwright, ba...
