Doug Cummings

Beginning this weekend and continuing June 8-9, LACMA will offer a series of postwar Japanese films rarely screened in L.A. While the museum's revamped film schema enforces brevity (compare this series to MoMA's upcoming "Tokyo 1955-1970" exhibition, which includes 40 films), it's still a bracing dip into forceful cinematic currents......

LACMA's animation screenings have been unusually strong this year, including a sold-out UPA show in March and an upcoming Paramount show on Thursday. But the rarest and most aesthetically significant gems will screen Friday in two programs introduced by the Center for Visual Music (CVM), the estimable Los Angeles archive......

Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are master storytellers who make gripping films dramatizing personal crises faced by poor and marginal characters (particularly adolescents) in their postindustrial hometown, Seraing. Their films feel spontaneous and immediate but are, in fact, highly scripted and rehearsed. Their latest, the Cannes-winning, Golden Globe–nominated The......

Terence Davies is one of the most original and compelling of British filmmakers, but his work remains commercially marginalized, especially in the U.S., where his most personal films are not available on DVD. The arrival of his new film, The Deep Blue Sea, is cause for celebration, particularly for Angelenos......

If you haven't taken the paradigm-shifting plunge into the films of Robert Bresson, there's no better place to begin than LACMA's double feature: new prints of A Man Escaped (1956) — Bresson's most accessible, suspenseful and heroic film, and cinema's best prison-escape movie — and the ultrarare Four Nights of......

French filmmaker Robert Bresson (1901-1999) is now widely considered one of cinema's singular geniuses — an artist in complete control of his tools, on a personal quest to render a profound vision of the world — but it took the critical establishment decades to appreciate him. Irate boos accompanied his......

Many Angelenos know Ross Lipman as the man behind stunning film restorations — Shadows (1959), Killer of Sheep (1977), The Exiles (1961) — but fewer are aware of his double life as an internationally acclaimed film, video and performance artist. He's a keen-eyed, softly bohemian globe-trotter and a wizard with......