After the war

Nov 13, 2018 — Turning to theater for inspiration, Kenji Mizoguchi transformed a popular eighteenth-century play into a spiritually charged meditation on forbidden love and societal oppression.

Jul 7, 2016 — Repertory PicksThis week, as part of its annual series the Auteurs, the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is screening Ingmar Bergman’s 1949 film Thirst. Like many of the Swedish master’s early works, this rarely shown character...

Jun 1, 2016 — Repertory PicksThis week, as part of a complete survey of Robert Aldrich’s career (running through mid-August), the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will screen the director’s explosive 1955 noir masterpiece Kiss Me Deadly. Based on Mickey Spillane’s pulp novel...

Mar 24, 2015 — Words—they conceal and reveal so much about us, as Errol Morris’s elusive and brilliant first films attest.

Feb 20, 2015 — In time for this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, we wanted to celebrate all the incredible women who have been nominated for best actress Oscars for their roles in Criterion titles. They range from the 1930s to the 2010s, and include...

Oct 30, 2014 — Tati’s witty visual comedy also functioned as satire of a rapidly modernizing postwar France.

Feb 19, 2014 — Alfred Hitchcock’s second Hollywood film, Foreign Correspondent, is a killer caper—but due to what was going on in the world during its production, it’s much more than that. Following an American journalist investigating an escalating war in Europe, the film...

Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...

Feb 18, 2013 — Performances Hiroshima mon amour (1959) is a groundbreaking portrait of a world come undone. Even more memorably, thanks to the brilliant precision of Emmanuelle Riva’s performance, it’s a study of a woman unraveling. In this first leading role in an...

Nov 14, 2011 — In 1989, the Communist rule that had dominated Eastern Europe since the end of the Second World War collapsed with astonishing rapidity. If the long-term political, economic, and ideological consequences of Europe’s reunification are still unfolding, there was an immediate...