The Criterion Collection

John Heard has passed away at the age of seventy-two, and both Deadline’s Denise Petski and Variety’s Pat Saperstein are claiming that he was best known as Peter McCallister, the father of Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister in the Home Alone . . . Read more »

Tarkovsky lover Geoff Dyer discusses the visual and sonic elements of one of the most haunting sequences in Stalker. Read more »

This week on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck, we zoom in on the artistry of two very different cinematographers. In Craig McCall’s 2010 Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff, viewers get an intimate look at one of cinema’s supreme . . . Read more »

The Venice International Film Festival has announced that Rosita (1923), “famed as the single collaboration between two of the giants of the silent screen, the director Ernst Lubitsch and the star Mary Pickford, is the film that has been chosen . . . Read more »

A landmark of mainstream queer cinema, Donna Deitch’s 1986 feature debut returns to theaters in a new restoration. Read more »

Director Ken Loach and his longtime screenwriting partner Paul Laverty, recipients of this year’s Crystal Globe award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, speak about the complex relationship between politics and cinema. Read more »

This year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato wrapped nearly three weeks ago now, and it’s the kind of festival that has attendees reflecting on each edition months and undoubtedly years down the line. Three especially notable pieces have appeared in just . . . Read more »

A showcase for the bighearted sensibility of the late Jonathan Demme, the tonally intricate comic thriller Something Wild plays in Athens, Georgia, today through Sunday. Read more »

“When putting together MoMA’s new film series, Future Imperfect: The Uncanny in Science Fiction, its curator, Josh Siegel, set out to compile a list of pictures that defined the genre within more earthly parameters,” writes Jake Nevins for the . . . Read more »

The Tracking Board’s Jeff Sneider broke the news and Variety’s Justin Kroll confirms it. Steven Soderbergh has secretly shot a film with Claire Foy and Juno Temple on an iPhone. The title seems to be all that’s known about it so far: Unsane. . . . Read more »

With a weeklong run of our new restoration of Desert Hearts opening at the IFC Center in New York, we spoke with director Donna Deitch about this landmark of LGBT filmmaking. Read more »

Todd Haynes will receive the Pardo d’onore Manor, the Locarno Film Festival’s lifetime achievement award, on August 7. The festival will also screen Haynes’s 1991 film Poison (image above). Jean-Marie Straub will receive his Pardo d’onore Manor . . . Read more »

“Yvonne Rainer stands as one of the most influential choreographers of the past fifty-plus years,” begins Melissa Anderson in the Village Voice. “In 1962 she co-founded the Judson Dance Theater, that exalted wellspring of experimental movement; . . . Read more »

One of the most iconic midnight-movie pairings—Suzan Pitt’s Asparagus and David Lynch’s Eraserhead—is now available to stream on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck. Read more »

During a period of personal turmoil, Andrei Tarkovsky created this enigmatic masterpiece, which explores spiritual and metaphysical mysteries through the prism of a science-fiction epic. Read more »

“Steven Spielberg laid claim to the Normandy beach landing,” begins Variety’s Peter Debruge, “Clint Eastwood owns Iwo Jima, and now, Christopher Nolan has authored the definitive cinematic version of Dunkirk. Unlike those other battles, . . . Read more »

The Venice International Film Festival, whose seventy-fourth edition will run from August 30 through September 9, has announced that, on September 1, Jane Fonda and Robert Redford will each be presented a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. . . . Read more »

Actor Aubrey Plaza and writer-director Jeff Baena make a formidable pair in the world of American comedy filmmaking. Known for her charmingly deadpan style and dry sense of humor, Plaza is beloved for her role as April Ludgate on the TV show . . . Read more »

We begin this round in the UK because, starting Friday, Park Circus is putting Basil Dearden’s Victim (1961) back in theaters, “marking 50 years since the Sexual Offences Act 1967 initiated a major development of the country's human rights . . . Read more »

“Martin Landau, the tall, intense, sometimes mischievously sinister actor best known for his role in the television series Mission: Impossible and his Oscar-winning portrayal of Bela Lugosi in the film Ed Wood, died Saturday in Los Angeles,” . . . Read more »

“Legendary filmmaker George A. Romero, father of the modern movie zombie and creator of the groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead franchise, has died at 77,” reports Tre’vell Anderson for the Los Angeles Times. “Romero died Sunday in his . . . Read more »

“The film’s tag line was ‘They share the same body . . . but hate each other’s guts!’ I was told that the timing was a coincidence, but even before the film began it was clear that this was a movie about America under Donald Trump.” A. S. . . . Read more »

Period melodrama doesn’t get more operatic than Luchino Visconti’s 1954 masterpiece Senso, one of the featured programs this week on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck. This opulent adaptation of a novella by Italian author Camillo Boito . . . Read more »

In a video essay on our release of Robert Bresson’s final film, scholar James Quandt explores some of the formal elements that make the master’s vision of moral corruption so transfixing. Read more »

“There’s the story of RoboCop visiting his house where he’s already RoboCop and he finds out he was called Murphy before, and he finds out where he lived and there’s these kinds of feelings and flashbacks about his wife and his son,” Paul . . . Read more »

Catherine Grant tips us off to Leo Robson’s interview with David Thomson for the January 2017 issue of the White Review. “Hawks is still for me the essential American director of the golden age,” says Thomson, and the conversation’s an engaging . . . Read more »

The newly opened Austin Film Society Cinema presents screenings of the Cannes award–winning animated film Fantastic Planet, a hallucinatory visual marvel designed by French artist Roland Topor. Read more »

“Martin Scorsese is putting the band back together,” writes Anita Busch, breaking the news at Deadline that “Joe Pesci has officially joined Al Pacino (whose deal is currently being finalized) and Robert De Niro in Scorsese’s Jimmy Hoffa . . . Read more »

“The spirit of Seijun Suzuki, patron saint of avant-garde Japanese filmmakers, presides over the Japan Society's 11th annual Japan Cuts program, a consistently exciting survey of innovative Nipponese cinema,” writes Simon Abrams at the top of . . . Read more »

New York. A retrospective of films by Alain Tanner opens today at the Metrograph and runs through July 23. Writing for Hyperallergic, Craig Hubert looks back on work Tanner did with the late critic, novelist, painter, and poet John Berger, . . . Read more »