Film Portrait

Feb 5, 2026 — In a collection of behind-the-scenes documentaries now playing on the Criterion Channel, legendary female performers assert their agency over their screen personae and find freedom in the glamour and artifice of their profession.

Jan 19, 2024 — We’ve been reading about Francis Ford Coppola, James Baldwin, Chantal Akerman, and Cary Grant and Randolph Scott’s barely kept secret.

Jul 18, 2023 — In her music, her films, and her often stormy romances, Birkin captivated us for more than half a century.

Apr 17, 2023 — Six of the eleven first and second features selected this year are directed by women.

Jun 15, 2022 — The late actor will be remembered for his work with Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson—and Jerry Seinfeld.

Jan 18, 2022 — Garrett Bradley warped the clock. In her masterwork Time (2020), the present is the past is the future—which is to say, the lie of linearity gets emptied. Virginia Woolf comes up, when I think of artists who have comparably seized...

Jan 14, 2020 — There’s been a whole of kvetching, but also a bit of celebrating since the nominations were announced on Monday.

May 31, 2019 — Cannes 2019 Cannes has been top dog in the festival world as long as anyone can remember. It was originally set to launch in 1939 as a conscious political reply by liberal democracy to the success of Mussolini in establishing...

Jan 7, 2019 — Critics are fine with the actors who’ve won Golden Globes this year—as for the films they appear in, not so much.

Nov 23, 2018 — The work of James Agee (1909–1955) remains one of the touchstones of American movie criticism. An extraordinarily versatile writer, he won acclaim as a novelist, a poet, and a screenwriter (his scripts for The African Queen and The Night of the...