The Way Way Back

Jul 17, 2015 — As visually and sociopolitically expansive as it is intimate in its details of a boy’s coming of age, Jan Troell’s film is one of the great cinematic debuts.

Jun 5, 2014 — The following is excerpted from an interview with Red River editor Christian Nyby that critic Ric Gentry conducted in 1991.

Jun 19, 2013 — Disorienting, brutal, and bloody beautiful, František Vláčil’s epic is a dark medieval vision teeming with cinematic invention.

Aug 24, 2009 — Whit Stillman took a risk when he set his third film during (and titled it after) the disco era, whose erstwhile existence, from almost the moment it ended, has seemed to embarrass most Americans more than Watergate. One would think...

Nov 15, 2004 — Short Cuts is an L.A. jazz rhapsody that represents Robert Altman at an all-time personal peak—and it came at just the right time in his career.

Sep 13, 2004 — The following piece by Sony Pictures Classics cofounder and copresident Michael Barker, who picked up Slacker for Orion Classics in 1991, originally appeared in the program for the 2001 Austin Film Society event Slacker: A Ten-Year Reunion. What I’ve found...

May 21, 2001 — Akira Kurosawa’s period film not only commemorated historical Japanese myths with new, vivid feeling but also created the source for many of the enduring entertainment tropes in world cinema today.

May 14, 2026 — Channel Calendars This month on the Criterion Channel, set out on an epic journey with our Odysseys collection, or revisit the foundational Bond classics that introduced the silver screen’s most iconic superspy. A spotlight on Courtney Love’s acting career reveals...

Jul 14, 2022 — Both intimidatingly massive and deeply sympathetic, the creature at the heart of Bong Joon Ho’s meat-industry fable is the product of a close collaboration between the director and artist Jang Hee Chul.

Oct 10, 2019 — Dark Passages Where the sea and the city meet, they corrupt each other. Around docks, the ocean’s margins are scummy with oil and floating garbage; the water corrodes hulls, encrusts pilings, and slimes steps. Ports cater to men who come...