As it has been revealed in dribs and drabs over the past decade, the famous twenty-year gap between Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998) was actually a rich period of ...

This paper begins with a single tear. That tear may manifest as a contradiction, or it may be hidden as self-evidence. The veils of meaning and emotion often conceal the structure of the object.

Miyamoto Musashi, one of a slew of patriotic films about swordsmen produced in wartime Japan, is the closest thing to a B-movie that survives from the work of the great director Kenji Mizoguchi. In it ...

When director Kenji Mizoguchi died of leukemia in 1956 he was 58 and a leading figure in world cinema, championed by members of the French New Wave, and the recipient of major prizes at the Venice ...

Director Kenji Mizoguchi’s “The Life of Oharu” (1952), newly available in a high-def digital restoration from the Criterion Collection, teems with contradictions. It’s epic yet delicate, set in feudal ...

Along with Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi was one of the greatest Japanese filmmakers of his era, but as respected and beloved as he is, he’s sometimes overshadowed by the other two ...

In some danger of being overlooked in the press of history that reveres Yasujiro Ozu’s rigorous constancy and Akira Kurosawa’s noble pulp, Kenji Mizoguchi is a more difficult master magician to love ...

After the Second World War, the American administration that ran things in Japan took control of the movie industry and, at first, banned historical stories. The first to pass muster was Kenji ...

When director Kenji Mizoguchi died of leukemia in 1956 he was 58 and a leading figure in world cinema, championed by members of the French New Wave, and the recipient of major prizes at the Venice ...