Hossain Sabzian may be cinema's greatest human subject. A man criminally tethered to his cinephilia, Sabzian's real-life impersonation of iconic Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to con a family of film fans demonstrates the consequences of a small lie while also elevating cinematic adoration to an unparalleled level. Yet Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up commits the same crime in its own way, interweaving documentary footage with reenactments featuring the real-life figures that populated Sabzian's charade. By "lying" to the audience through stylized retellings…

A reflection of middle-aged regrets in aquatic microcosms, The Swimmer infuses a cascading sense of European New Wave style into an undeniably American malaise, rooted in Long Island opulence and a Sisyphean sense of suburbia.

As towering and unwieldy as Paul Newman in Hud while maintaining the imagistic vulnerability of Rock Hudson in Seconds, Burt Lancaster gives both the greatest performance of his career and perhaps the most evocative performance of the 1960s, dissolving an individualist American dream in rippling…

Even ten years after my first Film History course, I continue to adore the aesthetic playfulness and political pretension of the French New Wave. The bold blend of semiotic adolescence and thematic underpinnings in Marxist counterculture capture a moment of European leftism indelibly even if it remains a bit superficial with few exceptions. My favorite works of the true New Wave (between Elevator to the Gallows in 1958 and The Mother and the Whore in 1973) tend to be those…