Series: BFI Film Classics

Ground-breaking in its departure from its predecessors, When Harry Met Sally (1989) established classic romantic comedy themes and tropes still being employed today. Placing the film in its historical, social and generic contexts, Tamar Jeffers-McDonald explores how writer Nora Ephron and director Rob Reiner used structure, filmic devices, music and classic romcom concepts in innovative new ways. In her fresh...

Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) scandalised mainstream popular opinion. Part of an emerging youth and protest movement, its graphic and balletic violence was highly subversive in the context of the war in Vietnam. It spoke directly to younger audiences, who were already pitted against their more conservative elders and easily identified with the characters played by Warren Beatty (who...

Widely believed to be Terry Gilliam's best film, Brazil's brilliantly imaginative vision of a retro-futuristic bureaucracy has had a lasting influence on genre cinema. Exploring its complex history and relationship with other dystopias, Paul McAuley explains why this satire on the unchecked power of the state is more relevant than ever.

In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul (Angst Essen Seele Auf, 1974), Emma (Brigitte Mira), a working-class widow and former member of the Nazi party, marries Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a much younger Moroccan migrant worker. Set in Munich during the 1970s, the film melds the conventions of melodrama with a radical sensibility to present a portrait of...

I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) is widely regarded as one of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's most remarkable achievements and a cinematic tour de force. A simple moral tale set in the wild Scottish Highlands, it follows the journey of a headstrong young woman forced by her encounter with this magical, mythic world and its exotic customs to revise...

Declared obscene in Japan, where it has never been shown in its entirety, Oshima Nagisa's In the Realm of the Senses, was shown uncut at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976: thirteen screenings were required to satisfy audience demand. The unprecedented explicitness with which the film presented sexual acts inevitably caused widespread controversy. But this is not a film which...

Guillermo del Toro's cult masterpiece, Pan's Labyrinth (2006), won a total of 76 awards and is one of the most commercially successful Spanish-language films ever made. Blending the world of monstrous fairytales with the actual horrors of post-Civil War Spain, the film's commingling of real and fantasy worlds speaks profoundly to our times. Immersing herself in the nightmarish world that...

Directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, and starring James Fox, Mick Jagger, and Anita Pallenberg, Performance was filmed in 1968, but not released until 1970. When its studio backers saw the director's cut, they were so shocked by the film's sexual explicitness and formal radicalism that attempts were made to destroy the negative. In his study of the film,...

Peter Weir's haunting and allusive Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), set in 1900, tells the story of the mysterious disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher on a trip to a local geological formation. The film is widely hailed as a classic of new Australian cinema, seen as exemplary of a peculiarly Australian style of heritage filmmaking. Anna Backman Rogers'...

Lynne Ramsay's bleak yet beautifully photographed debut unflinchingly portrays life on a Glasgow housing estate during the 1973 refuse collectors' strike, as seen through the eyes of 12-year-old James Gillespie (William Eadie). After James's friend falls into a canal and drowns, James becomes increasingly withdrawn. As bags of rubbish pile up and rats move in, James finds solace in his...

Despite being one of Andrei Tarkovsky's most successful films, Solaris (1972) was the one he most disliked. This dismissal of his most generically marked film has often been accepted by those quick to embrace the image of Tarkovsky as a transcendent artist rising above the politics of the Soviet film industry and the trappings of genre to produce personal works...

The Seventh Seal is probably Bergman's best-known work and the film that most clearly bears the director's unmistakeable signature. The opening scene sets the tone: a stony beach under a leaden sky, the knight alone with his thoughts, then the approach of black-clad Death, whom the knight invites to play a game of chess. Bergman's medieval allegory of faith and...

The first computer-generated animated feature film, Toy Story (1995) sustains a dynamic vitality that proved instantly appealing to audiences of all ages. Like the great Pop Artists, Pixar Studios affirmed the energy of modern commercial popular culture and, in doing so, created a distinctive alternative to the usual Disney formula. Tom Kemper traces the film's genesis, production history and reception...

Produced in the aftermath of the Second World War, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946) stars David Niven as an RAF pilot poised between life and death, his love for the American radio operator June (Kim Hunter) threatened by medical, political, and ultimately celestial forces. The film is a magical, profound fantasy and a...

For many, Blue Velvet is David Lynch's masterpiece. It represents a unique act of cinema: an 80s Hollywood studio film as radical, visionary, and cabalistic as anything found in the avant-garde; a mysteriously symbolic and subterranean 'cult' movie that nevertheless has recognisable stars and was broadly distributed; a genre piece with the ambience of a fearsome, hyper-composed nightmare; an American...

Citizen Kane's reputation as one of the greatest films of all time is matched only by the accumulation of critical commentary that surrounds it. What more can there be to say about a masterpiece so universally acknowledged? Laura Mulvey, in a fresh and original reading, illuminates the richness of the film, both thematically and stylistically, relating it to Welles's political...

Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) has long been recognised as one of the key artistic expressions of the nuclear age. Made at a time when nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union was a real possibility, the film is menacing, exhilarating, thrilling, insightful, and very funny....

It is becoming clearer and clearer that Groundhog Day (1993), directed by Harold Ramis, is one of the masterpieces of 1990s Hollywood cinema. One of the first films to use a science-fiction premise as the basis for romantic comedy, it tells the story of a splenetic TV weatherman, Phil Connors (Bill Murray at his disreputable best), who finds himself repeating...

Chris Marker's La Jetée is 28 minutes long and almost entirely made up of black-and-white still images. Since its release in 1964, the film – which Marker described as a 'photo-novel' – has haunted generations of viewers and inspired writers, artists, and filmmakers. Its spiralling narrative of post-nuclear war time-travel has influenced many other films, including the Terminator series and...

Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing (1989) is one of the most popular and celebrated examples of the African-American new black film wave. Set during the hottest day of a hot summer in New York City, the film's ensemble cast, including Lee himself, brilliantly play out the edgy negotiations and dramas of a racially and culturally diverse working-class Brooklyn neighbourhood....

Lawrence of Arabia is widely considered one of the ten greatest films ever made - though more often by film-goers and film-makers than by critics. This monograph argues that popular wisdom is correct, and that Lean's film is a unique blend of visionary image-making, narrative power, mythopoetic charm and psychological acuteness.

Werner Herzog's Nosferatu – Phantom der Nacht (1979) is one of the masterpieces of the New German Cinema of the 1960s and 70s. Adapted from Bram Stoker's Dracula, and mindful too of F. W. Murnau's earlier German film version of that same novel, Herzog's film is perhaps the most compelling screen treatment of the vampire myth. In this comprehensive account...

While digging an extension to the London Underground Railway, workmen discover an object which might be an ancient Martian spaceship – and Professor Quatermass of the British Rocket Group investigates a mystery which prompts frightening revelations about the origins of humanity itself. Before 2001: A Space Odyssey and Doctor Who, Quatermass and the Pit was the paramount British science fiction...

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) is one of the most historically pivotal of all films. The first American film of the celebrated German director F.W. Murnau, Sunrise tells the story of a love triangle between characters named only as The Man, The Wife, and The Woman from the City. Lucy Fischer’s compelling study of the film shows how...

Paul Schrader was in meltdown in 1972. Drinking heavily, living in his car, he was hospitalised with a gastric ulcer. There he read about Arthur Bremer's attempt to assassinate Alabama Governor George Wallace: the story was the germ of his screenplay for Taxi Driver (1976). Executives at Columbia hated the script, but when Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, who...

Thelma & Louise, directed by Ridley Scott and written by Callie Khouri, sparked a remarkable public discussion about feminism, violence, and the representation of women in cinema on its release in 1991. Subject to media vilification for its apparent justification of armed robbery and manslaughter, it was a huge hit with audiences composed largely but not exclusively of women who...

Amy Sargeant's compelling and meticulous study of Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963) sets the film in the context of a long tradition of fictional depictions of the master-servant relationship, from Shakespeare to Cervantes, Henry James, Dorothy L. Sayers and P.G. Wodehouse. Sargeant points out that while many of these relationships are played for comic effect, that of the 'young master'...

Released in 1990, The Silence of the Lambs is one of the defining films of late twentieth century American cinema. Adapted from the Thomas Harris novel and directed by the late Jonathan Demme, its central characters are now iconic. Jodie Foster is Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee investigating ‘Buffalo Bill’, a serial killer who flays his victims. Anthony Hopkins plays...

Bringing Up Baby, directed by Howard Hawks in 1938, is one of the greatest screwball comedies and a treasure from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Cary Grant plays a naive and repressed palaeosaurologist who becomes entangled with (and ensnared by) a wilful heiress (Katharine Hepburn). Chaos ensues as romance blossoms and not one but two leopards are set loose in...

Ever since its world premiere at the Cannes film festival in May 2005, audiences have been talking about Michael Haneke's Caché. The film's enigmatic and multi-layered narrative leaves its viewers with many more questions than answers. The plot revolves around the mystery of who is sending a series of sinister videos and drawings to Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil), the presenter...

Gone with the Wind (1939) is one of the greatest films of all time—the best-known of Hollywood's Golden Age and a work that has, in popular imagination, defined southern American history for three-quarters of a century. Drawing on three decades of pertinent research, Helen Taylor charts the film's production history, reception, and legacy.

When Head-On (Gegen die Wand, 2004) won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, it was hailed as a turning point for German cinema. Not only was this unconventional love story the first German film in eighteen years to win the prestigious award, but the success of writer-director Fatih Akin was also celebrated as the revival of German...

Caravaggio (1986), Derek Jarman's portrait of the Italian Baroque artist, shows the painter at work with models drawn from Rome's homeless and prostitutes, and his relationship with two very different lovers: Ranuccio, played by Sean Bean, and Lena, played by Tilda Swinton. It is probably the closest Derek Jarman came to a mainstream film. And yet the film is a...

One of the greatest collaborations in cinema history, L'Âge d'Or (1930) united the geniuses of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali in creating a Surrealist masterpiece. This film is a uniquely savage blend of visual poetry and social criticism. It was banned and vilified for many years in various countries, becoming legendary for its subversive eroticism and its furious dissection of...

Jean Renoir's 1937 film La Grande Illusion is set during the First World War, but its themes of Franco-German conflict, divided loyalties in a time of war and the rise of anti-Semitism made it compelling and controversial viewing. Julian Jackson traces the film's historical context and its reception history.

A thrilling tale of anxiety and moral extremity, Marnie (1964) cemented Alfred Hitchcock's reputation as a master of suspense and the visual form. Murray Pomerance here ranges through the many tortuous and thrilling passages of Marnie, weaving critical discussion together with production history to reveal Marnie as a woman in flight from her self, her past, her love, and the...

F.W. Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu, the first (albeit unofficial) screen adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, starring Max Schreck as the hollow-eyed, cadaverous vampire, remains a potent and disturbing horror film. Kevin Jackson's study traces Nosferatu's eventful production and reception history, including attempts by Stoker's widow to suppress it.

Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II (1974) is a magisterial cinematic work, a gorgeous, stylised, auteur epic, and one of the few sequels judged by many to be greater than its predecessor. This is despite the fact that it consists largely of meetings between aspiring 'Godfather' Michael Corleone and fellow gangsters, politicians, and family members. The meetings remind us...

"It may be the most sophisticated political thriller ever made in Hollywood," film critic Pauline Kael wrote of John Frankenheimer's terrifying 1962 political thriller about an American serviceman brainwashed in Korea and made into an assassin. Sophisticated to be sure, it's also a headlong fall through the looking-glass of American politics and the most deeply prophetic film of the second...

Murray Pomerance offers an illuminating account of one of Hitchcock's most intriguing and successful films, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), starring James Stewart and Doris Day. Through a close reading of the film alongside analysis of its complex production history, Pomerance's analysis highlights its darkest nuances, and its themes of musicality, gendered power, and cultural strangeness. He proposes...

This is an examination of The Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton's only outing as a film director. It looks at the symbolism of the piece, at Willa, her throat cut sitting in the Model-T Ford, and the Preacher, a silhouetted threat on the horizon.

Endlessly fascinating, dark and bright, The Red Shoes (1948) employs every branch of the cinematic arts to sweep the audience off its feet, invigorated by the transcendence of art itself, only to leave them with troubling questions. Representing the climax of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's celebrated run of six exceptional feature films, the film remains a beloved, if unsettling...

Fifty years after its release, The Sound of Music (1965) remains the most profitable and recognisable film musical ever made. Quickly consolidating its cultural authority, the Hollywood film soon eclipsed the German film and Broadway musical that preceded it to become one of the most popular cultural reference points of the twenty-first century. In this fresh exploration, Caryl Flinn foregrounds...

Earning critical acclaim and commercial success upon its 1998 release, Rushmore—the sophomore film of American auteur Wes Anderson—quickly gained the status of a cult classic. A melancholic coming-of-age story wrapped in comedy drama, Rushmore focuses on the efforts of Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman)—a brazen and precocious fifteen-year-old—to find his way. Restless, energetic, struggling, and overcompensating for his insecurities, Max pursues...

Throne of Blood (1957), Akira Kurosawa's reworking of Macbeth, is widely considered the greatest film adaptation of Shakespeare ever made. In a detailed account of the film, Robert N. Watson explores how Kurosawa draws key philosophical and psychological arguments from Shakespeare, translates them into striking visual metaphors, and inflects them through the history of post-World War II Japan. Watson places...

Described by its maker as a poem of horror, Vampyr (1932) is one of the founding works of psychological horror cinema, adapted from a collection of gothic stories by Sheridan Le Fanu and directed by the revered Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer. Despite the fact that there is no definitive print and many English versions are marred by poor quality...

Pedro Almodóvar’s 1988 black comedy-melodrama Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown established its director as one of the most exciting of European filmmaking talents. An often hilarious study of sexual mores, Women on the Verge has a central character, Pepa (Carmen Maura), as warm and richly drawn as any modern film heroine. Made strong and self-reliant by suffering...

Richard Schickel’s study of Billy Wilder’s 1944 noir classic Double Indemnity traces in fascinating detail the genesis and realisation of the film: its literary origins in James M. Cain’s hard-boiled crime novel, the difficult relations between Wilder and his scriptwriter Raymond Chandler, the casting of a reluctant Fred MacMurray, and the late decision to cut the expensively filmed execution sequence...

How did a film made to capture a pop phenomenon become an enduring cinematic classic? With warmth, wit and precision, Samira Ahmed reveals how the Beatles’ first film changed both the band themselves and pop music’s relationship with the screen. In a vivid and personal exploration, she shows how this black-and-white gem, shot in a documentary style and brimming with...

Easy Rider (1969) broke the mould of Hollywood studio production, making stars of Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson, and launching a new wave of radical and experimental American cinema. One of the key films of the late 60s, Easy Rider enshrined the ideals of the counterculture, but also foresaw their demise in the division and paranoia of a...

In his compelling study of if.... (1968), which stars Malcolm McDowell as an English public school student who leads a guerrilla insurgence, Mark Sinker traces director Lindsay Anderson’s depiction of the progress from repression, conformity, and fusty ritual to anarchy and bloody revolt. The film’s title is a sardonic nod to Rudyard Kipling’s most famous poem, while its narrative explores...

Djibril Diop Mambéty’s exuberant, inventive and urgent film Touki Bouki (The Journey of the Hyena) (1973) follows a young couple, Mory (Magaye Niang) and Anta (Mareme Niang), who dream of leaving their home in Dakar, Senegal for an imagined better life in Paris. Rosalind Galt’s insightful study analyses Touki Bouki’s cinematic worlds, from its narrative of postcolonial migration to its...

Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948) is unarguably one of the most important films in the history of cinema. It is also one of the most beguiling, moving and (apparently) simple pieces of narrative ever made. The film tells the story of one man and his son, as they search fruitlessly through the streets of Rome for his stolen bicycle;...

Beau Travail (1998) is Claire Denis' bold, sensuous masterpiece. Loosely based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (1924), the film explores the complexities of desire, identity, and power within an all-male group of French Foreign Legionnaires stationed at a coastal outpost in the former colony of Djibouti, in East Africa. The film cemented Denis' position as a leading auteur and...

In this compelling study, Daisuke Miyao explores Jean-Pierre Melville's cult 1967 thriller Le Samouraï, a film that unfolds in a coolly stylised Paris where the paths of a contract killer, Jef Costello (Alain Delon), and the police commissaire pursuing him (François Périer) fatally intersect. Despite its title, Le Samouraï is not a sword-clashing tale of feudal Japan. Rather, Miyao suggests...

Fellini's La dolce vita has been a phenomenon since before it was made, a scandal in the making and on release in 1960, and a reference point ever since. Much of what made it notorious was its incorporation of real people, events, and lifestyles, making it a documentation of its time. It uses performance, camera movement, editing, and music to...

It’s 1984, and investigative reporter Arthur Stuart is trying to locate Brian Slade, the glam-rock superstar who staged his own death and vanished from the spotlight ten years earlier. Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine (1998) transforms that mystery into a vivid collage of memory, fantasy, and desire, creating an alternative history of rock and a landmark of queer cinema. Velvet Goldmine...

David Cronenberg's Crash (1996) attracted controversy when it was first screened in London, and remained banned in 1998 by at least one borough council. The film won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes, only for some members of the jury to disassociate themselves from it. And yet it is a controlled, formal film, unsensational; more analytic than titillating. It is...

The multiple award-winning Doctor Zhivago (1965) is one of America's finest films of all time. Ian Christie contextualises the film as an epic Russian love story and a Cold War classic, charts its production and reception, including the contribution of designer John Box, and discusses the unique history of the Bruce Pasternak novel it is based on.

Stanley Kubrick died on 7 March 1999 at his Hertfordshire home, having finished the editing of his last film. Eyes Wide Shut was released later that year. Adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 Viennese novel Dream Story, relocated and updated to contemporary Manhattan, Eyes Wide Shut stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a prosperous couple whose marriage is tested in...

From Here to Eternity (1953) is one of the most controversial films of its time. Adapted from James Jones's bestselling novel, the landmark blockbuster deals frankly with adultery, military corruption, physical abuse, racism and murder, and traces the unhappy lives of five American outsiders in the last days before Pearl Harbor. Made at the height of the Cold War and...

Jean Renoir's La Regle du Jeu must be the nearest thing in cinema to an undisputed masterpiece, a movie universally cherished by critics and film-lovers, central to the work of film theorists, and revered by filmmakers as varied as Alain Resnais, Paul Schrader and Cameron Crowe. This study relates the history of Jean Renoir's La Regle du Jeu to the...

A visually stunning and heartfelt riposte to the emotional sterility of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Douglas Trumbull's eco-themed Silent Running (1972) became one of the defining science-fiction films of the seventies. Bruce Dern excels as lonely hero Freeman Lowell, cast adrift in deep space with three robotic 'Drones' who become his 'amazing companions' on a journey 'beyond imagination'. Mark...

Winston Churchill hated The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and tried to have it banned when it was released in 1943. However, Martin Scorsese, a champion of directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, considers it a masterpiece. It’s a film about desires repressed in favour of worthless and unsatisfying ideals. It also explores how England dreamt of itself as...

Made on a low budget, The Terminator was one of the most influential films of the 1980s. Combining explosive special effects and an intricate time-travel plot, it set Arnold Schwarzenegger on the road to superstardom and allowed its director, James Cameron, to go on to make some of the most expensive films of all time. The Terminator quickly found a...

The War of the Worlds was one of a handful of high-prestige science fiction productions in a low-budget era, and initiated modern cinema's reliance on screen-filling special effects. Barry Forshaw analyses and celebrates this key science fiction film of the 1950s, exploring its literary origins and numerous film progeny.

Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932) was released at a critical moment in cinema history, just after the advent of synchronised sound technology and just before the full implementation of the production code. By the time of its release, Lubitsch had already directed more than 50 films, but it was unlike anything he had done before. Aside from being his...

Brief Encounter (1945), adapted from Noel Coward's play Still Life, is a classic of British cinema – a tale of impossible love between a married woman and a man she meets while waiting for a train. Though it is a film made by men, it is the woman's voice we hear recounting the story of a small-town love affair and...

Groundhog Day (1993), directed by Harold Ramis and starring Bill Murray, is widely regarded as one of the most original and enduring films of 1990s Hollywood. What begins as a high-concept romantic comedy about a cynical television weatherman forced to repeatedly relive the same day soon deepens into a tale of despair and renewal, coloured by existential unease and the...

L'Atalante is the work of French director Jean Vigo. It is a study of romantic love, told in a style influenced by surrealism, but still Vigo's own. This text is part of the BFI Film Classics series. Each volume in the series presents a personal commentary on the film, together with a brief production history and a detailed filmography, notes...

Sixty years after its release, Singin' in the Rain (1951) remains one of the best-loved films ever made. Yet despite dazzling success with the public, it never received its fair share of critical analysis. Gene Kelly's genius as a performer is undeniable. Acknowledged less often is his innovatory contribution as director. Peter Wollen's illuminating study of Singin' in the Rain...

Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960) has been hailed as one of the great classics of world cinema (Adrian Martin), and one of the five or six greatest melodramas in cinema history (Serge Daney). A striking blend of modernist aesthetics and melodramatic force, it is arguably the best-known film by Ghatak, widely considered to be one of...

The Matrix (1999), directed by the Wachowski sisters and produced by Joel Silver, was a true end-of-the-millennium movie, a statement of the American zeitgeist, and, as the original film in a blockbusting franchise, a prognosis for the future of big-budget Hollywood film-making. Starring Keanu Reeves as Neo, a computer programmer transformed into a messianic freedom fighter, The Matrix blends science...

Groundbreaking in its departure from its predecessors, When Harry Met Sally... (1989) established classic romantic comedy themes and tropes still being employed today. Following the relationship between its title characters, Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan), and their best friends Jess (Bruno Kirby) and Marie (Carrie Fisher), the film unfolds as a series of episodes, from Harry and Sally's...

Y Tu Mamá También (2001), an intelligent and sensual road movie directed by Alfonso Cuarón and co-written by him and his brother Carlos, is both an acclaimed feature by a director who would go on to win Oscars and a box office success abroad and in its native Mexico, where it was the biggest grossing local film of all time....

The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami burst onto the international film scene in the early 1990s and was widely regarded as one of the most distinctive and talented modern-day directors. His major features — including Through the Olive Trees (1994), Taste of Cherry (1997) and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) — are relatively modest in scale, contemplative, and humanist in...

Don't Look Now, released in 1973, confirmed director Nicolas Roeg as one of the most stylish and innovative British directors of the postwar period. Adapted from a short story by Daphne du Maurier, it is both a complex study of how people come to terms with grief and a chilling tale of murder set among the canals and churches of...

Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948) is unarguably one of the most important films in the history of cinema. It is also one of the most beguiling, moving, and seemingly simple works of narrative ever made. The film tells the story of one man and his son as they search fruitlessly through the streets of Rome for...

Robert Hamer’s Dark Ealing It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) is a claustrophobic domestic melodrama, combining elements of film noir and gritty realism. It tells the story of a frustrated housewife, Rose Sandigate (Googie Withers), who rekindles a former love affair with an escaped convict, Tommy Swann (John McCallum). Praised by critics upon its release, the film emerged during a...

My Neighbour Totoro (1988) is one of the best-loved films created by Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. Nearly forty years after its first release, Totoro remains beloved in Japan and abroad, a child’s-eye vision of the sublime and a celebration of the magical richness of the Japanese countryside. Everything feels placed at a child’s level, from the implicit spiritual environmentalism...