The Point Men

Oct 16, 2014 — This past August, on the occasion of Volker Schlöndorff’s being selected for a Silver Medallion award by the Telluride Film Festival, Criterion’s Peter Becker talked with the German filmmaker about his long career. A short version of the conversation was...

Sep 3, 2007 — It came from nowhere, it’s always been here—or so Stranger Than Paradise might seem.Jim Jarmusch had completed his first feature, Permanent Vacation, in 1980 and spent the next four years working on his second. Screened a few times as a...

Oct 14, 2026 — Putin’s crackdown on independent media sends TV Rain journalists fleeing the country.

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...

Jul 22, 2026 — The filmmaker looks back on the experiences that have shaped his creative life, including his time in art school, his work as a graphic designer and music-video director, and his early interest in documentary cinema.

Apr 29, 2025 — Drawing from a rich tradition of films that depict the lives of sex workers, Sean Baker’s Oscar-winning triumph takes a complex approach to exploring the fundamentally transactional nature of human relationships.

Feb 18, 2021 — We’re reading about Visconti, Fellini, Tom Stoppard, Eartha Kitt, and Anton Walbrook.

Dec 18, 2017 — When Mathieu Amalric’s Barbara with Jeanne Balibar premiered in the Un Certain Regard program of this year’s Cannes Film Festival in May, it won an award for Best Poetic Narrative. A month later, it won the Jean Vigo Award, and...

Jul 31, 2017 — Broadway World has broken the sad and startling news that “playwright, actor, author, screenwriter, and director Sam Shepard has passed away. Shepard, who had been ill with ALS for some time, died peacefully on July 27 at his home in...

Jan 22, 2013 — Andrei Tarkovsky’s austere, minimalist, and poetic film was the first major accomplishment in an oeuvre that would become one of Russia’s main contributions to the treasury of world cinema.