To the Stars

Sep 5, 2018 — Training its patient gaze on the vicissitudes of domestic life, Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage is a showcase for high-wire acting, requiring its two stars to chart a winding trajectory from love to betrayal to reconciliation. By the time shooting...

Jul 24, 2018 — A feast of sumptuous color and cinematic imagination, Powell and Pressburger’s postwar masterpiece is also a powerful reckoning with recent history.

Feb 22, 2018 — Critic, filmmaker, and festival programmer Tony Rayns explains how Kon Ichikawa intermingles modernist and classical styles in his masterpiece An Actor’s Revenge.

May 23, 2017 — Continuing my trip through Cannes history, today I’m focusing on one of the most celebrated works of Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni, who became an international sensation partly thanks to the booing and heckling he endured at the Cannes premiere of...

Apr 24, 2017 — Music has always been a central character in the films of Wim Wenders. Ranging from the classic rock of the Kinks in his debut feature, Summer in the City, to the melancholy twang of Ry Cooder’s guitar in Paris, Texas,...

Jan 4, 2017 — Repertory PicksPlaying this week at the Charles Theatre, in Baltimore, Maryland, Gregory La Cava’s delightful 1936 romp My Man Godfrey stars the effervescent Carole Lombard as eccentric Manhattan socialite Irene, who decides to hire a man she believes to be...

Feb 16, 2016 — In Death by Hanging, Nagisa Oshima spins a complex aesthetic web around his documentary-like structure, packing detail, history, politics, and emotion into his surrealist inquiry into capital punishment.

Jan 28, 2016 — Next Friday, Film Forum begins a weeklong run of our new 4K restoration of Antonio Pietrangeli’s 1965 masterpiece I Knew Her Well, presented by filmmaker Alexander Payne. This newly rediscovered gem, one of Pietrangeli’s most complex and enchanting works, was...

Oct 15, 2015 — Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni are cast against type—and funnyman director Ettore Scola gets serious—in this humane drama set in Fascist Italy.

Oct 16, 2014 — This past August, on the occasion of Volker Schlöndorff’s being selected for a Silver Medallion award by the Telluride Film Festival, Criterion’s Peter Becker talked with the German filmmaker about his long career. A short version of the conversation was...