Features

In the thirty-fifth edition of the Italian festival dedicated to restored films, an eclectic lineup underscores the transportive physicality of cinema after a long year stuck at home.

Translated into English for the first time, this afterword to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s novelization of his film explores the director’s attraction to fiction writing and how the art form differs from narrative cinema.

The author of Velvet Was the Night pays tribute to the shockingly stripped-down, dread-inducing use of silence in Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterful neonoir.

A ballad from the 1910s becomes a precarious way station between life and death in Akira Kurosawa’s portrait of an ordinary man’s final days.

At a perilous moment in the history of the western, a series of films by Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott stood out for their no-nonsense lucidity.

Despite the studio system’s stifling conditions, Buster Keaton’s follow-up to The Cameraman remains a testament to the funnyman’s singular style.

Since its classic-Hollywood heyday, noir has remained a vibrant mode in both studio and independent filmmaking, taking on nostalgic resonances in the highly referential work of Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, Brian De Palma, and the Coen brothers.

A raucous, fast-talking diva, the actor had a remarkable ability to convey both glamour and silliness, a gift that made her the queen of screwball comedy before her untimely death in 1942.

Nine writers with roots in the Chinese-speaking world pay tribute to the Hong Kong auteur’s most beloved actors.

For reasons this veteran editor and best-selling author can’t fully explain, an unsung film adaptation of a Neil Simon play has become an abiding domestic comfort many years after he first encountered it.

Banned upon its release in Germany, Leontine Sagan’s groundbreaking lesbian love story doubles as a cogent antifascist statement.

Postwar Hollywood’s quintessential heavy wields his signature mix of brutality and neurosis to embody an abusive husband in Max Ophuls’s psychological drama.

This touchstone of nineties independent filmmaking is a reminder that true queer cinema is about taking risks and breaking taboos—an increasingly rare thing in our corporatized entertainment culture.

The Hollywood silent era’s leading female director was a meticulous visual stylist whose films were infused with a passion for progressive social values.

The author of the acclaimed novel Memorial reflects on how Edward Yang’s epic swan song has accompanied him around the world, through different stages of his life.

Known for her resilient heroines, the prolific Japanese actor finds agency through moments of hesitation in one of her seventeen collaborations with Mikio Naruse.

The world’s largest Indigenous film festival challenges the individualist ethos of the dominant cinema culture—and invites us to think outside the exclusionary box.

The legendary film composer may be best known for his work on Sergio Leone’s iconic visions of the American frontier, but a closer listen reveals his mastery of a wide variety of genres, sounds, and styles.

Residents of a neglected Hawaiian island fight against eviction and mistreatment in this consciousness-raising documentary from 1981, now playing on the Criterion Channel.

The director of Test Pattern examines how toxic masculinity gets in the way of the domestic bliss briefly enjoyed by the film’s downtrodden protagonists.

Obsessed with the lure of memory and the stigma of social otherness, Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes inspires this writer to take her own winding journey into the past.

From Here Comes Mr. Jordan to Defending Your Life (which we recently released in a new edition), cinematic visions of the great beyond often hinge on widely shared anxieties and uncertainties about our earthly existence.

With movies that spoke urgently to the nation post-independence, the director forged a path between the realist tendencies of the era’s art-house cinema and the pleasures of popular genre filmmaking.

One of the world’s most passionate cinephiles, Bertrand Tavernier, passed away last month. His longtime friend celebrates the enduring legacy of his filmmaking, his ideas, and his advocacy of underappreciated artists.