Stories We Tell

Jan 1, 2021 — Along with new features from Pedro Almodóvar, Lynne Ramsay, and Todd Haynes, the new year will bring series directed by Barry Jenkins, Sofia Coppola, and Wong Kar Wai.

Oct 19, 2020 — The irrepressible spirit of Pasolini wafts in and out of this month’s round.

Sep 23, 2020 — From Hitchcock’s orbit to The Architecture of Cinematic Spaces, here’s some of this month’s best writing on new books.

Aug 31, 2020 — Documentaries lead the charge this month on the Criterion Channel, with a wide-ranging offering of nonfiction films as formally imaginative and emotionally riveting as any scripted drama.

Aug 18, 2020 — A sensuous exploration of amorous discontent and dreadful miscalculation, The Comfort of Strangers (1990) could be described as an erotic thriller, though it rarely is: its eroticism is too perverse, its pedigree too highbrow. Directed by Paul Schrader and based...

Aug 14, 2020 — One Scene Over the course of an adventurous career that encompassed narrative and documentary filmmaking as well as photography, sculpture, and video installation, Agnès Varda was a shape-shifter who merged her deep engagement with social reality with a playful, endlessly...

Aug 12, 2020 — Mia Hansen-Løve makes delicate, graceful films about overpowering emotions. After beginning her career in front of the camera, acting in Olivier Assayas’s Late August, Early September (1998) and Les destinées (2000) as a teenager, she transitioned to directing at the...

Aug 11, 2020 — The Complete Films of Agnès Varda In September 2018, I screened Agnès Varda and JR’s Faces Places for the Michigan State University Film Collective. We had a lively discussion that went past the scheduled ending time. As I was getting...

Jun 23, 2020 — In Céline Sciamma’s unabashedly romantic and fiercely political film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), two women fall in love and set each other free, if for only a few glorious days or weeks. It is one of the...

May 15, 2020 — Directors, actors, and critics look back on their most memorable moments in movie theaters, and the BFI spotlights the best of Japanese cinema.