By David D'Arcy

Alan Bennett's smash Broadway hit, The History Boys, made its way to movie theaters last year with its winning team, director Nicholas Hytner and the solid ensemble cast, intact. David D'Arcy talks with Bennett about England in the 80s, performance vs truth and the state of comedy today.

The History Boys is now on DVD.

By Adam Hartzell

The cinema of Hong Sang-soo "is very much a walking cinema in its pace, in its space for reflection, and in its elliptical nature, each ending leading us into the next film, or returning us to a film, or scene, that preceded it," writes Adam Hartzell, who explains why his recent talk with the Korean director, on the occasion of the release of Woman is the Future of Man on DVD, is not an interview - per se.

Interview By David D'Arcy

"Like his previous hits The White Balloon and The Circle, [Jafar] Panahi's soccer movie Offside is blatantly metaphoric and powerfully concrete, deceptively simple and highly sophisticated in its formal intelligence," writes J Hoberman in the Village Voice.

And as David D'Arcy notes, prefacing his interview with the Iranian director, "this time Panahi has added humor to the tenderness and poignancy of his earlier films."

by Megan Ratner

Before the indies and even before the French New Wave, Italian neo-realism staked out new cinematic territory. One of those blanket terms that mean all things to all people, neo-realism has few absolutes, though there are elements that set the Italian version distinctly apart. Screenwriter and poet Cesare Zavattini wrote an actual manifesto to guide these films, but their creation was just as much a result of timing, chance and fluke. Unquestionably, their greatest single influence was the anti-Fascism that marked World War II's immediate postwar period. Key elements are an emphasis on real lives (close to but not quite documentary style), an entirely or largely non-professional cast, and a focus on collectivity rather than the individual.