The Star

Oct 18, 1998 — 1986 was not a good time to make a film which attempted to capture the Punk spirit. Deep into second-term Reagan/Thatcher, American and British pop culture were infected with cynicism, hopelessness, immobility. So when Alex Cox came over with his...

Nov 18, 1997 — Erotic and antierotic, Crash the movie begins boldly enough with a vacantly lissome blonde (Deborah Kara Unger) dreamily opening her blouse to press a bare nipple against the enameled surface of an airplane fuselage before allowing a total stranger to...

Jan 11, 1988 — Alfred Hitchcock committed a shocking murder in Sabotage (1936). Here, in one of the director’s darkest works, a child unknowingly carrying a bomb is blown to pieces in the streets of London. The death of Stevie is a deliberate attempt...

Oct 24, 2018 — An international star who has delivered acclaimed performances in the popular television series The Walking Dead, Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, and Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, Steven Yeun tells us about the “wise grace” of Tokyo Story, the brutality of RoboCop, and other...

Nov 21, 2008 — Patton Oswalt is a stand-up comic, the instigator of the Comedians of Comedy tour, and voice star of Pixar’s Ratatouille. He wrote an appreciation of Allen Baron’s film Blast of Silence in Sean Phillips’s comic book Criminal (Phillips did the...

Sep 16, 2008 — Comic-book rock star Mike Allred is best known as the creator of Madman, Red Rocket 7, and The Atomics. He may also be familiar to Criterion viewers from his illustrations for Seduced and Abandoned and Chasing Amy. Allred: "My list...

The singer-songwriter shares why Thelma & Louise was a North Star when writing her first album, praises the way Days of Heaven immerses viewers in its beauty, and talks about her deep affection for Grey Gardens.

Sep 18, 2025 — This month’s programs offer a feast of horror, including a John Carpenter retrospective and a collection of the most terrifying films of the 2000s.

Jul 19, 2024 — We’re looking back to films by Pakula and Oshima, and from the 1990s, by Claire Denis and Richard Shepard.

Mar 22, 2022 — In Robert Aldrich’s epic disaster film, James Stewart leads a pack of temperamentally different men as they struggle to survive in the face of the unknown—a template that would go on to influence Hollywood blockbusters for decades to come.