The Criterion Collection
Nov 7, 2005 — Often appearing on lists of the ten greatest films of all time, called one of the most beautiful films ever made, or the most masterful work of Japanese cinema, Ugetsu comes to us awash in superlatives. No less acclaimed has...
Essays
Aug 2, 2004 — Dismissed as minor Jean Renoir, the film deserves better, especially when seen in the larger context of numerous American and European films of the 1950s and their shared preoccupation with theater and performance.
Apr 27, 2026 — During the evening rush on a busy Los Angeles boulevard, a man steps into a news-vendor’s stall and scans the out-of-town papers section, where journals offer balm for homesick travelers and transplants. But his hometown, Evanston, Illinois, is missing—no call...
Essays
Nov 25, 2020 — “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a fatal abyss.” Wanda in The White Sheik (1952) I have a vivid memory from the first film-studies class I enrolled in, a class on Italian neorealism, where the weekly...
Jun 27, 2005 — Kô Nakahira’s taboo-busting melodrama heralded a reinvention of Japanese cinema.
May 26, 2003 — Transcription of a speech given by long-time Derek Jarman collaborator and friend, actress Tilda Swinton
Features
Jun 4, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder stocked the cast of The Merchant of Four Seasons with friends and colleagues from his experimental theater days.
Feb 7, 2023 — One of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s closest collaborators, the Polish composer suffuses the quotidian images that appear throughout Blue, White, and Red with deep poetry and sacred meaning.
The Daily
Nov 20, 2023 — This month brings new books on Godard and Bergman, novelists moonlighting as film critics, and biographies of Lena Horne and Elizabeth Taylor.
Mar 17, 2020 — Released in, or rather let loose upon, the first year of the new millennium, Spike Lee’s febrile and ferocious media satire Bamboozled—the fifteenth feature-length “joint” of a prolific career—found its writer-director in an unflinching mode and an unforgiving mood. According...