Your second feature, Maelstrom, a dark comedy from 2000 about guilt and bodily alienation, meant a lot to me at the time, and still does. It feels more similar to Enemy than any of your other films.

I am fine, thank you. I have been so busy lately! My schedule has been very hectic for the past two years, so I am having a good rest now, recharging my batteries before starting to work again. What’s ...

Although Merleau-Ponty’s observation can be applied to painting and filmmaking, as well as literature, traditional film criticism has tended to follow the pattern of traditional literary criticism in ...

Taxi Driver has a lot of negative aspects, but it would be silly to shrug off its baroque visuals and its high-class actor, Robert De Niro, whose acting range is always underscored by a personal ...

A gleefully sensual and inventive comedy, Tampopo was an art-house smash in 1987. Director Juzo Itami drew on American noirs and gangster films and Westerns and probably comic books, too, to come up ...

For years the Japanese had considered Yasujiro Ozu “too Japanese” to be appreciated by the West. Kurosawa and then Mizoguchi were the directors promoted in the West. Donald Richie and Joseph ...

Present Tense is a column by Sheila O’Malley that reflects on the intersections of film, literature, art, and culture. Tatum O’Neal in The Bad News Bears (Michael Ritchie, 1976) “Laced with ...

Present Tense is a column by Sheila O’Malley that reflects on the intersections of film, literature, art, and culture. Johnny Depp and Faye Dunaway in Arizona Dream (Emir Kusturica, 1993) The ...

Ever since Park Chan-wook’s 2003 Cannes Grand Prix winner Oldboy—a film that epitomized the New Korean Cinema and turned the hammer-wielding Choi Min-sik into an icon—he has maintained a reputation ...

Land of the Pharaohs (1955, Howard Hawks). When I first saw it, as a kid, Land of the Pharaohs became my favorite film. I’d always been addicted to historical epics, but this one was different: it ...

The revolution in streaming, which changed the industry and helped make our annual box-office chart a thing of the past ...

The results are in for our 2023 poll of Film Comment’s contributors! On this page, you’ll find our list of the best films that were released either theatrically or virtually in 2023 in the United ...