The Criterion Collection
Feb 11, 2017 — Ermanno Olmi captures the dignity of work in this painterly vision of late nineteenth-century rural Italy.
Mar 21, 2016 — Edward Yang’s masterful 1991 adolescent epic telegraphs the tensions and turbulence of 1960s Taiwan, when youth pop culture and teen street gangs became a major societal force.
Essays
Nov 25, 2015 — Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film about one man’s mortality offers a study in postwar Japan, Kurosawa vs. Ozu, and the realization that knowing how to die requires learning how to be alive.
Jan 13, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s characters play an endlessly layered game of dress-up in this tale of sadomasochistic love.
Essays
Nov 12, 2013 — Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig create a luminous, romantic portrait of a young woman looking for fulfillment in New York City.
Apr 25, 2011 — In 1981, the legendary critic went all out for Blow Out, which she thought was De Palma's most mature work to date.
Apr 30, 2009 — The concept of “obscenity” is tested when we dare to look at something that we desire to see but have forbidden ourselves to look at. When we feel that everything has been revealed, “obscenity” disappears and there is a certain...
Apr 28, 2003 — The fourth installment in François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel saga is a comedy about marriage, the desire to escape it, and the craftiness involved in running from one’s own desires.
The Daily
Jun 12, 2026 — We’re hunkering down with an oral history of Steven Spielberg and reading about Mary Harron, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Radu Jude, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Essays
Mar 31, 2026 — Violently nihilistic, simultaneously energizing and crushing, Tsui Hark’s remake of the martial-arts classic One-Armed Swordsman captures the zeitgeist of pre–1997 handover Hong Kong.