Features

A string of recent programs, including the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, have illuminated important actors and filmmakers whose success challenges the impression that early cinema was exclusively the preserve of white men.

In the context of Sydney Pollack’s gender-crossing comedy, the mellow love theme sung by Stephen Bishop suggests that the plenitude of romantic possibility has the power to break down social boundaries.

Six writers confront their fascination with films about murderers, including the true-crime shocker Angst, the quasi-documentary Landscape Suicide, and the erotic thriller In the Cut.

The author of the acclaimed book Pop Song came to her love of cinema—including the work of Agnès Varda—by trying to watch her partner’s favorite films through his eyes.

In the landscape of gay-themed cinema, which often focuses on positivity and pride, The Delta stands out for asking unsettling questions about the limits of queer connection across socioeconomic and racial divides.

Made in the 1990s, The Salt Mines and The Transformation take an unflinching look at the bigotry and economic hardships faced by a community of trans sex workers of color.

Both the foil and the mirror to Greta Gerwig’s beloved heroine, the role of Sophie comes alive in a performance imbued with emotional candor and prickly autonomy.

From Richard Linklater to Isabelle Huppert, some of cinema’s most beloved figures have shown their commitment to the art form by operating venues with stellar repertory programs.

One of the first recognized female filmmakers to hail from the UK, Wendy Toye delivers the strongest, most chilling vision in this underappreciated omnibus film, which features Orson Welles and Alan Badel.

The Oscar-winning actor—whose one-hundredth birthday we’re celebrating on the Criterion Channel—embodied a mess of contradictions that have long been obscured by her reputation for unbending rectitude.

The legendary Hollywood auteur channeled his deep fascination with the father of psychoanalysis in three revelatory but underappreciated films: Let There Be Light, Freud, and Reflections in a Golden Eye.

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.