The Criminal

Nov 25, 2013 — He massages, he gambles, and he’s great with a blade. Who is this blind swordsman, anyway?

Mar 24, 2026 — Novelist Silvia Moreno-Garcia programs a series of films by Roberto Gavaldón, Julio Bracho, Emilio Fernández, and Luis Buñuel.

Sep 12, 2023 — Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction and Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario are received in Toronto with applause, laughter, and a few reservations.

Feb 8, 2022 — A Prohibition-era gangster saga, the Coen brothers’ third feature is an enigmatic fable of violence, loyalty, and existential unease.

Jan 18, 2022 — Garrett Bradley warped the clock. In her masterwork Time (2020), the present is the past is the future—which is to say, the lie of linearity gets emptied. Virginia Woolf comes up, when I think of artists who have comparably seized...

Jun 17, 2021 — The first real lesbian kiss in a film is an honor that rightfully belongs to Mädchen in Uniform. It’s true that a year earlier, in 1930, Marlene Dietrich played a tux-clad chanteuse who snogs a woman in a nightclub audience...

Dec 6, 2019 — Starting this weekend on the Criterion Channel, you’ll be able to steal some time with one of cinema’s most pulse-pounding subgenres. In the heist movie, even the most perfectly planned crimes run the risk of going awry, putting the mettle...

Sep 16, 2019 — In a dark moment, Laurence Olivier often reached for a laugh. His lofty, somewhat burdensome reputation as his century’s greatest dramatic actor belies the mercurial essence of his craft, which was to seize upon the humanity in each of his...

Jul 19, 2018 — Repertory Picks This weekend, the Guild Cinema in Albuquerque, New Mexico, will plunge into the shadows, as the theater launches its fifteenth-annual Festival of Film Noir, a celebration spanning ten days, five double features, and countless criminal acts. The festival...

Jan 18, 2018 — To Save and Project: The 15th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation opens tonight with William K. Howard’s Transatlantic (1931; image above), “a pre-Code comedy firmly set during the golden age of ocean travel,” as Caroline Golum notes at Screen...