Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer is a Mexican-American film critic, editor, and film programmer based in Brooklyn. He is currently the ...

The Film Comment Letter is a free weekly digital newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing—including the Film Comment Podcast, features, reviews, interviews, streaming picks, news, and ...

(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 ...

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Eleonora Duse was the first actor—and the first Italian—to appear on the cover of Time Magazine. The occasion, for the July 30, 1923 edition, was an American comeback tour by the 64-year-old stage ...

Loosely based on a 1982 Broadway show itself loosely based on Federico Fellini’s 1963 film 81⁄2, the Weinstein Company’s Oscar flagship Nine represents Indiewood’s ultimate appropriation of the ...

(Yojiro Takita, Japan, 2008)The members of the Academy who gave Departures its Oscar must be feeling their mortality. The movie tells the story of a second-rate cellist who loses his job when an ...

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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 ...

(Takashi Miike, Japan, 2010)Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins is bound to be regarded by some as its director’s most mature film to date—mistakenly so. It’s true that particularly in its truncated, ...

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(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 ...