This article appeared in the November 26, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

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Ranked according to the time of their last feature film release ...

(Nikita Mikhalkov, Russia, 2007)For numerically titled Russian movies of the moment, stick with 4 instead of 12. Old soul Nikita Mikhalkov’s appropriation of the 12 Angry Men template is a bloated ...

1. Johnny Guitar Nicholas Ray, 1954 2. Mouchette Robert Bresson, 1967 3. Laura Otto Preminger, 1944 4. Barry Lyndon Stanley Kubrick, 1975 5. Muriel Alain ...

(Warner Archive, $18.95)As John Ford said to a teenage Spielberg: “Where’s the horizon?” In Philip Kaufman’s 1974 film it rises almost to the top of the frame, an unforgiving expanse governed by harsh ...

For modernist poet H.D. and her contemporaries at the journal Close Up, the young medium of cinema lit up the room with soul-stirring force By Sheila O'Malley in the May-June 2020 Issue The Madonna of ...

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 ...

Two guys, tough guys, sit in the waiting room of Martin Scorsese’s Manhattan offices. Are they auditioning for Scorsese’s forthcoming Mafia movie? Are they a pair of Willem Dafoe’s roustabout apostles ...

On the edge: this year’s competition featured new work from Petzold, Porumboiu, and Hong, as well as new voices from around the world ...

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 ...

For instance, what, in the United States in 2010, made a then-unknown 19-year-old Jennifer Lawrence so riveting in Winter’s Bone, the film that vaulted her—now the highest paid actress in ...