Godfrey Cheshire

Guessing that director Andrei Zvyagintsev’s The Return is probably unknown to you, perhaps I should introduce it by saying that this Russian debut is not only the best new film I’ve seen so far in 2004, but also one that came as a complete surprise. Though the film won the Golden Lion at the Venice […]

Strangely enough, this season’s most electrifying and urgently topical movie was filmed not last year but nearly four decades ago. A stunningly vivid, endlessly thought-provoking chronicle of the Algerian Muslim revolt against French rule in the 1950s, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers became a worldwide art-house sensation after its completion in 1965. It returned […]

About midway through The Alamo, a well-intended but fumbled effort at epic moviemaking, Davy Crockett (Billy Bob Thornton) is sitting around a campfire swapping stories with other defenders of the besieged fort. Crockett, as he himself wryly appreciates, is already an American folk hero with a legend far more imposing than the man who inspired […]

Pondering Crimson Gold, the extraordinary new film by Iranian master Jafar Panahi, prompted me to recall a moment in the recent Oscar telecast. Accepting her trophy for Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola displayed a charming ingenuousness in thanking several of the filmmakers who had influenced her, including Michelangelo Antonioni. In one sense, the citation was […]

In his essay “Divine Epiphany and Spiritual Birth in Ismailian Gnosis,” the great Iranologist Henry Corbin recalls a crucial scene recounted in the Gnostic Acts of John: On the evening of Good Friday the Angel Christos, while the multitude below, in Jerusalem, imagines that it is crucifying him, causes the apostle John to go up […]

The best documentary released in a year that became famous for its excellent (and often very popular) documentaries, Errol Morris’ Oscar-nominated The Fog of War reconnoiters nearly a half-century of American cultural, military and political history via an extensive, ruminative interview with Robert S. McNamara, whose long career in the public sphere climaxed when he […]

Sometimes to really appreciate an actor’s abilities you need to see him not in a striking lead role, but in a crucial secondary part. That thought occurred as I watched Malcolm McDowell in Robert Altman’s The Company, and I was aware at the time how unusual it was for me to be preoccupied more with […]

Watching Gus Van Sant’s Elephant at the New York Film Festival last fall, I had a feeling that invariably steals over me sometime during the year–a strong inkling that, whatever else the cinematic year might bring, this movie would rest atop my 10-best list at year’s end. And so Elephant did. Yet even as my […]

If you’ve ever spent time in a foreign, more traditional culture, you know how strangely unsettling it can be to return to the West. My most memorable experience in this regard was my first trip to Iran, which, I told people later, in some ways reminded me of America in the 1950s or early ’60s. […]