The Criterion Collection
May 25, 2010 — In the films of Stan Brakhage, the viewer’s role must be reimagined: from a passive receiver to one who meets the film halfway, actively plumbing the depths of its imagery and the various themes and ideas suggested by its subject...
Nov 5, 2020 — Performances Whenever I think of the iconic Bengali actor Supriya Choudhury, the first thing I recall is not her face—with its high cheekbones and large, kohl-rimmed eyes that often drew comparisons to Sophia Loren’s—but her voice, disembodied, tearing through the...
Features
Jan 17, 2020 — Of all the weird scenes that populate seventies science-fiction cinema, the most bizarre might be in 1971’s The Omega Man. Based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the film imagines a world in which fallout from a distant war has...
Apr 24, 2019 — When It Rains Charles Burnett has long been recognized by historians as one of the greatest American film directors, and he’s won numerous important awards, including an honorary Oscar in 2017. Nevertheless, he is still relatively unknown beyond the world...
The Daily
Feb 22, 2018 — Luis Buñuel was born on this day, February 22, in 1900. “By 1961, Buñuel was born again, so to speak,” writes Jeremy Carr, having sketched the career from Un chien andalou (1929) and L'âge d'or (1930) through the years in...
Sep 23, 2015 — Bruce Beresford draws on a controversial episode of Australian colonial history from 1901 to create an electrifying drama that questions the moral certitude of war.
Mar 31, 2026 — Claude Lelouch’s Palme d’Or–winning breakout hit combines elements of a classic Hollywood love story with dynamic photography, an edgy editing style, and a naturalistic sense of character and location.
Nov 23, 2021 — The End In the end, it should not have come as any kind of surprise. When Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine’s international poll of...
Mar 17, 2020 — Released in, or rather let loose upon, the first year of the new millennium, Spike Lee’s febrile and ferocious media satire Bamboozled—the fifteenth feature-length “joint” of a prolific career—found its writer-director in an unflinching mode and an unforgiving mood. According...
Essays
Mar 27, 2012 — Written in five or six days in 1941, in a seaside hotel where he had gone to get away from the Blitz, and by all accounts scarcely revised before being mounted some six weeks later, Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit became...