Features

First Person

The author of The Fortress of Solitude considers the meditative, “brain-rinsing” effects of the solo moviegoing experience.

Anxiety, panic, and chronic ambivalence course through the hilarious films of one of America’s most influential comedic voices.

Performances

In the first of his two collaborations with Satyajit Ray, the Bengali superstar did not just rely on his image, he enriched it with a unique blend of charisma and craft.

Childishly anarchic in worldview and distinctly analog in look, the animated films of Bill Plympton are a testament to the pleasures of painstaking craftsmanship.

The beloved actor, who passed away earlier this month, brought a live-wire sensibility and a genius for improvisation to a small but potent filmography.

One of indie visionary Bill Gunn’s creative partners looks back on the struggles they faced in a racist movie industry and the making of their long-neglected masterpiece Personal Problems.

Deep Dives

A noirish tale of closed-door dealings and systemic corruption, I Will Buy You is the anti-sports movie that feels most like baseball in 2020.

One Scene

Filmmakers Ashley Connor, Anna Rose Holmer, Kirsten Johnson, and Lauren Wolkstein explore the moments in the French master’s oeuvre that resonate most deeply with them.

First Person

The author of Call Me by Your Name remembers the first time he saw The Apartment—and the long, late-night pilgrimage through a vanishing Manhattan that the film inspired.

Songbook

The heartbreaking lament “Fare Thee Well” builds in resonance as it drifts through multiple scenes in the Coen brothers’ folk-fueled drama.

The Canadian auteur’s fanatically elaborate puzzle-box narratives invite the audience to discover their hidden meanings and bear the psychological burdens of their characters.

Songbook

In Nagisa Oshima’s POW drama Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, a palpable but forbidden attraction achieves its most potent expression through music.

One Scene

Separated from the domestic spaces they once inhabited, two glass vases and a mahogany desk settle into a caged museum life in Olivier Assayas’s deeply felt family portrait.

Songbook

In La dolce vita, an upbeat tune by Nino Rota turns a dour party into a feast of ecstatic movement.

In celebration of his hundredth birthday, we look back on the legacy of the extraordinarily prolific icon of Italian cinema, whose unmatched rapport with audiences stretched across a six-decade career.

A racist, traditionally desexualized archetype from classic Hollywood gets queered and eroticized in Cheryl Dunye’s indie landmark The Watermelon Woman, now playing on the Criterion Channel.

The legendary Belgian-born filmmaker sought to break free from the strictures and conventions of cinematic portraiture, a career-long project that brought her relationship with her mother into focus.

A pedestrian activity becomes a radical vision in Elevator to the Gallows, La notte, Vagabond, and other films that follow their female stars on foot.

The director of The Times of Harvey Milk pays tribute to one of LGBTQ history’s most beloved trailblazers and looks back on the making of the Oscar-winning documentary portrait.

Deep Dives

Now playing on the Criterion Channel, this underappreciated gem by British master Carol Reed captures the lively, antic spirit of a bustling section of London’s East End.

The highest-paid writer in Hollywood at a time when women were at the forefront of shaping the industry, Oscar winner Frances Marion created some of the most unforgettable stories in 1920s and ’30s American cinema.

One Scene

The director of Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project and Spaceship Earth reflects on the power of seeing a moment of pure joy—the defeat of California’s homophobic Proposition 6 in 1978—in Rob Epstein’s classic portrait of Harvey Milk.

To celebrate the centenary of Saul Bass, we spoke with six contemporary title designers about highlights from his legendary four-decade filmography.

A down-to-earth goddess of screwball, this Hollywood legend exuded a disarming mix of toughness and vulnerability, and made her mark as one of the most fiercely independent stars of her era.