The Unknown

Jan 14, 2019 — Songbook “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” could have had many lives before the life it eventually had. But the song had to work hard to be recorded at all. No one particularly wanted to sing it, and it was turned...

Apr 18, 2018 — Sofia Coppola lets us behind closed doors in ways that are beyond the imagining of the novel’s boy narrators.

Aug 4, 2017 — Olivier Assayas’s next project is E-book, a “full-blown comedy” starring starring Juliette Binoche, Guillaume Canet, Vincent Macaigne, Christa Theret and Pascal Gregory, report John Hopewell and Emiliano Granada for Variety. In Locarno, where he’s currently presiding over the competition jury,...

May 17, 2016 — Before the release of his new film Sunset Song, the beloved filmmaker stopped by the Criterion kitchen for lunch and became especially animated when our discussion drifted toward two of his great loves: the plays of Anton Chekhov and musicals...

Feb 23, 2016 — Without any overt topical references, Mike Nichols’s The Graduate captured the zeitgeist of the 1960s and the dawning countercultural revolution.

Nov 13, 2012 — With this frenetic cinematic fresco, Pasolini began his Trilogy of Life and its forays into a world as yet unspoiled by capitalism.

Sep 26, 2011 — No preconceptions. No rehearsals. No rules. Assayas's on-the-fly bio is exhilaratingly all over the map.

Dec 1, 2009 — The deeply disturbing drama of this landmark documentary about the Rolling Stones sprang from the disturbing drama of the times.

Sep 22, 2009 — Something very heavy happened at Monterey last weekend. Those very odd three days began in Friday’s cool gray air as the first of the crowd began to circle through the booths of the fairground. The only word for it then...

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...