As in a Looking Glass

Jan 31, 2024 — Shifting recklessly between realism and surrealism, this drug-fueled odyssey from director Danny Boyle is a propulsive satire of depleted masculinity in urban Scotland.

Oct 31, 2023 — With the full force of her imagination, director Nikyatu Jusu examines the complicated nature of Black motherhood, as well as the importance of Black communion as an antidote to racial oppression.

Feb 24, 2022 — Next month on the Criterion Channel, we’re pushing the envelope with a series of the pre-Code films made by Paramount Pictures, a centenary tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini, and a collection of groundbreaking concert documentaries.

Jul 20, 2021 — Dismissed as gossip-column fodder in its time, Jacques Deray’s cooly enigmatic villa thriller is an exploration of masculine vanity and feminine disillusion.

Jan 13, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s characters play an endlessly layered game of dress-up in this tale of sadomasochistic love.

Mar 26, 2013 — Charlie Chaplin manages to make a ruthless murderer likable in his brilliant satire of middle-class morality.

Mar 25, 2022 — With its rambling Victorian mansions and seedy charms, the once-exclusive area of downtown Los Angeles was film noir’s favorite neighborhood.

Dec 3, 2018 — True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 paean to American eccentricity and ordinariness, called to me from the shelves of a video store in Austin, Texas. Subtitled “A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas,” True Stories is not “true”...

Feb 15, 2018 — Think of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and pink pastels, purple uniforms, and the occasional splash of red may come to mind, offset by the ochres and faded wood grains of the scenes that frame the main story. Moonrise Kingdom...

Apr 22, 2010 — It’s easy to get anxious about the place of Jean-Luc Godard in our cultural slipstream. He’s held a top-shelf slot of honor that has seemed unassailable for nearly sixty years, but sometimes I fear that his currency is becoming drastically...