Current

An online magazine covering film culture past and present

Midnight: The Game of Love
Midnight: The Game of Love

Mitchell Leisen’s marvelously chic and brilliantly constructed screwball classic revolves around a heroine who flounders through a succession of complications but always manages to come out ahead.

By David Cairns

I’ll Be Your Mirror: Megan Abbott Talks with William Horberg About Ripley on Film
I’ll Be Your Mirror: Megan Abbott Talks with William Horberg About Ripley on Film

The acclaimed crime writer joins a producer of the 1999 adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley to discuss the cinematic incarnations of Patricia Highsmith’s shape-shifting, quintessentially American antihero.

By Megan Abbott

The Wiz: A Soulful Oz
The Wiz: A Soulful Oz

Sidney Lumet’s lavish adaptation of a Tony Award–winning stage musical combines an ecstatic appreciation of Black artistry with a celebration of freedom and perseverance.

By Aisha Harris

Behavioral Studies: A Conversation with Ifeyinwa Arinze
Behavioral Studies: A Conversation with Ifeyinwa Arinze

The director discusses her path from neuroscience to cinema and the childhood memory that inspired her short August Visitor, a film about culture and intergenerational understanding.

By Tayler Montague

The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers: En Garde for Joy!
The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers: En Garde for Joy!

Suffused with slapstick humor and slightly surreal wit, Richard Lester’s beloved take on a frequently adapted adventure epic embodies a style of extravagant filmmaking that didn’t survive long past the 1970s.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Killer of Sheep: Everyday Blues
Killer of Sheep: Everyday Blues

A landmark of independent cinema, Charles Burnett’s debut feature captures daily life in Watts, Los Angeles, with a depth and precision that evokes the history of Black American music.

By Danielle Amir Jackson

Alice Coltrane’s Transcendent Journey into Late-Night Television
Alice Coltrane’s Transcendent Journey into Late-Night Television

In the singular mid-1980s TV show Eternity’s Pillar, the jazz iconoclast gives viewers a chance to experience the healing powers of her music—and the intense spiritual practice that fuels it.

By Shannon J. Effinger

Dangerous Work: Cy Endfield, Film Noir, and the Blacklist
Dangerous Work: Cy Endfield, Film Noir, and the Blacklist

The exiled American director of Try and Get Me! and Hell Drivers depicted crime and violence as the inevitable results of capitalist competition.

By Imogen Sara Smith

How to Get Ahead in Advertising: Monstrous Carbuncle
How to Get Ahead in Advertising: Monstrous Carbuncle

A film about and against everything, this astonishingly original comedy attacks Big Brother, the bomb, and the incipient collapse of our planetary ecosystem, along with the lies that stop us from recognizing all of the above.

By David Cairns

Withnail and I: What a Piece of Work
Withnail and I: What a Piece of Work

Set in the dying days of the 1960s, Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical tale of two unemployed actors is a triumph of screenwriting and a brilliant showcase for then-unknown stars Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann.

By David Cairns

The Criterion Channel’s June 2025 Lineup

Channel Calendars

The Criterion Channel’s June 2025 Lineup

This month, dive into some of cinema’s most memorable swimming pools, dine across Europe with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, and watch out for that suave sociopath Tom Ripley.

The Wind Will Carry Us: Dust to Dust
The Wind Will Carry Us: Dust to Dust

In this masterpiece of lived-in ethical complexity and high spiritual stakes, Abbas Kiarostami explores the tensions between provinciality and modernity, and between artists and their subjects.

By Kaveh Akbar

Video

Room Tone 2023
On Film  – 25 Dec 2023