Lovers Lost

May 22, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so common that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. But when this action appears in a movie, it is revealed as more than the original mode...

Apr 9, 2020 — The San Francisco–based creative team Century, cofounded by Jason Hardy and Steve Knodel, is no stranger to working with Criterion, having designed our Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema set, as well as the current form of this very website. The latest of...

Mar 27, 2020 — The cost to the Soviet population due to the war with Germany from 1941 to 1945 has not been definitively established; the best-circulated estimate, about twenty-seven million, is thought by some scholars to be low by many millions. Under Joseph...

Mar 26, 2020 — Deep Dives BOOM! Mahler (1974) begins auspiciously and iconoclastically, as befits its director, with a peaceful lakeside scene shattered by an abrupt conflagration. The combusting hut echoes Kiss Me Deadly and anticipates The Sacrifice and Lost Highway (Lynch: “I got...

Jan 17, 2020 — Of all the weird scenes that populate seventies science-fiction cinema, the most bizarre might be in 1971’s The Omega Man. Based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the film imagines a world in which fallout from a distant war has...

Dec 10, 2019 — Rock music, as director Wim Wenders once joked in an interview, offered to him and other Germans of his generation the “only alternative to Beethoven.” There is likely as much truth as hyper­­bole in the statement; considering the role that...

Nov 21, 2019 — Every love affair requires a border crossing. The person you see across a crowded bar, or meet at a dinner party, or find on a dating app is another country altogether—maybe a nice place to visit, but do you really...

Oct 28, 2019 — This year’s Tokyo International Film Festival salutes two singular directors, both in their eighties now but still going strong.

Oct 11, 2019 — Highlighted this week are an alternative history, the state of the documentary, and the influence of Antonioni and Pialat.

Oct 7, 2019 — Critics respond to the New York Film Festival’s selection of new moving image art.