Features

Songbook

In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking, the briefly heard Japanese pop hit that inspired the film’s title is both a portal to long-buried memories and a minor detail that resists interpretation.

With the future of film exhibition more uncertain than ever, several small-scale organizations with highly personal curation are proving they have what it takes to survive against the odds.

Before ringing in the new year, we’re taking a look back at some of the most memorable essays and interviews we published in 2020.

With her contralto drawl, genius for innuendo, and fierce control behind the camera, this great Hollywood provocateur pioneered a sex-positive cinema far ahead of its time.

First Person

Cinematic and carnal ravishment are sometimes at cross-purposes, as this celebrated American essayist discovered after many fumbled attempts at merging the two.

The esteemed actor, who died in November, was far more than the face of Satyajit Ray’s cinema. Always, though, he maintained an unwavering devotion to his roots in Bengal.

In Albert Lewin’s cagey adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, homosexuality is viewed as it was in much of classical Hollywood cinema: as an eerie monstrosity.

One Scene

The director of Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Nest examines the violence and unexpected humanism in one of Michael Haneke’s most unnerving long takes.

One of the French auteur’s most immersive art projects finds itself on the brink of format obsolescence, as Acrobat plans to phase out Flash software at the end of the year.

Performances

The legendary Bengali actor worked within and against conventions of melodrama to embody the pain of a woman destroyed by her own selflessness.

In the wake of Bong Joon Ho’s internationally beloved hit, a new Criterion Channel series looks back at the explosion of Korean filmmaking that began at the turn of the millennium.

The deeply introspective music in Claudine brings layers of emotional authenticity and nuance to a portrait of Black love and family.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning poet pays tribute to the liberating power of the pioneering filmmaker and his truth-telling body of work.

First Person

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a New York writer recalls the pure, easy pleasures of the multiplex and the feeling of escape at the heart of moviegoing.

Songbook

The iconic band’s 1976 song “Radio-Activity” finds a perfect home in the final episode of Berlin Alexanderplatz, providing a musical correlative to the film’s interrogation of national identity.

One Scene

A rich investment banker obliviously meets a moment of reckoning in David Fincher’s intricately plotted thriller.

Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3

The efforts of The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project have served as a powerful vehicle for reconfiguring the history of the art form in critical and expansive ways.

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.