Robert Bresson

Long before the tiny, talking heads of "Mystery Science Theater 3000" yammered their brainy commentary over well-worn sci-fi films, there was the benshi. During the heyday of silent films, Japanese audiences flocked to see the latest imports from the...

Jane Campion has been many things, including the only woman to win the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or and an inspiration, she only recently found out, to Quentin Tarantino, who confided that her success with "The Piano" emboldened him to feel "you...

Friday July 24, 1998      That first-time filmmaker Darren Aronofsky calls his picture "Pi," the symbol designating the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, suggests right away that it's not going to be any ordinary science-fiction...

Friday March 31, 2000      Production notes for Mark Hanlon's "Buddy Boy" describe it as "a dark and twisted exploration of faith, alienation and madness"--and is it ever! Aidan Gillen's Francis is an introverted stutterer who lives in an extravagantly...

Friday October 6, 2000      Lars von Trier's "Dancer in the Dark," that most morose of musicals, is so exasperating in its contradictions, so frustrating in its fakery, so deeply irritating in its pretensions, it's frankly hard to know where to begin...

Friday December 22, 2000      Through his acclaimed autobiographical films, most notably "Distant Voices, Still Lives," England's Terence Davies has demonstrated a knack for bringing the past alive to disclose pain and treachery beneath a seductively...

A dazzling epic of love, guns, gangsters and cigarettes, Jean-Pierre Melville's "Le Cercle Rouge" (The Red Circle) is about three men on the run and one man on the hunt. Originally released in 1970, it was one of only 13 features directed by the French...

There is something remarkable about Lukas Moodysson's ability to keep us in our seats for a movie that's as relentlessly bleak as his latest, "Lilya 4-Ever." That doesn't sound like much of a recommendation, but one of the things that separates real movie...

There are all sorts of reasons we go to the movies -- to be soothed or excited or to hide out in the dark -- but at their most sublime, film transports us out of the here and the now. It sounds corny to talk about transcendence and the movies,...

Some years before he died, the French director Robert Bresson gave an interview to film critic Michel Ciment. Bresson was in his early 80s and had recently completed "L'Argent." The film, Bresson's last, concerns a man who commits a murder for money but...

Although Thérèse Martin's "Story of a Soul" has been translated into 60 languages and has sold a reported 100 million copies since its 1898 publication and led to Martin's canonization in 1925, Leonardo Defilippis' film of her brief life will be best...

In "Dragonfly," a souped-up romantic tale of longing for contact beyond the grave, we're told that the Doctors Darrow (Kevin Costner and Susanna Thompson) are the perfect team--he has the head and she supplies the heart. Both work at the same Chicago...