The legendary film director Ingmar Bergman died early this morning at his home in Sweden. He was 89 years old. Born into a middle-class family in Uppsala, Bergman struggled with issues of faith, mortality, and identity throughout his life; these themes would echo through his films, including classics such as Persona, Wild Strawberries, Fanny and Alexander, and The Seventh Seal. Bergman is remembered most for his visionary style and his complicated portrayals of love......

Drawing Restraint Why woo your sweetheart with such tediously traditional notions as flowers, teddy bears and edible panties when you could watch Matthew Barney and his inamorata Bjork going at each other with flensing knives on the deck of a Japanese whaling vessel in Drawing Restraint 9? And if that's not enough Barney for you, there's the making-of documentary Matthew Barney: No Restraint. His work has sometimes been described as a "hauntingly dreamlike fantasy......

Mafioso - In 1962, a decade before The Godfather, Alberto Lattuada came out with this crime drama starring Alberto Sordi as a factory foreman who returns to his hometown of Sicily and is unwittingly pressed into service as a hitman for the local Don. Considered by many to be the first Italian movie to portray the modern Mafia, the film is noted for its faithful and darkly funny depiction of mob life. Breaking and......

Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower, which closed out last November’s AFI Festival, is now in release. Curse takes place on the eve of the Chrysanthemum Festival in the year 928 A.D. at the end of the Tang Dynasty, as the emperor (Chow Yun-Fat) arrives unexpectedly to find that the empress (Gong Li) is unwell, despite the herbal medicine that he personally prescribes. The palace setting—the crazy psychedelic colors of its jade walls,......