The Punishment

Oct 9, 2015 — Guy Maddin and his filmmaking partner Evan Johnson dropped by the Criterion kitchen to talk about their new film, The Forbidden Room.

Apr 14, 2015 — Preston Sturges revealed a lot about himself and the movie business in this hilarious and socially committed comedy.

Jun 25, 2013 — How Claude Lanzmann made a thoughtful film about the unthinkable and unfilmable.

May 20, 2010 — Driven to Destruction Nagisa Oshima was a destructive force in Japanese cinema—and he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Intent on exploding taboos and jabbing the eye of the status quo, he created films that leave us with a...

Nov 19, 1989 — After finishing High and Low (1963), director Akira Kurosawa recalls, “I started looking around for something else to do and quite by accident picked up [the novel] Red Beard by Shugoro Yamamoto. At first I thought it would make a...

Dec 13, 2023 — In June 2023—six months after the release of his Oscar-winning, stop-motion, antifascist-fable version of Pinocchio—Guillermo del Toro found himself speaking to an audience at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, an underground-comix-influenced, hand-drawn-looking cartoon...

Dec 3, 2020 — First Person A dedicated movie buff from my teenage years onward, and an assiduous if not pedantic completist forever seeking out obscure backlist items by favorite auteurs, such as that rare screening of George Cukor’s The Model and the Marriage...

Jun 26, 2018 — John Waters’ favorite among his early works is both an assault on political correctness and a no-holds-barred expression of gay militancy.

Aug 24, 2010 — I n a photograph of Josef von Sternberg from 1937, he looks like a character from one of his own films: a turbaned magus with elegantly trimmed beard and mustache, holding a cigarette as he gazes out obliquely, with the...

Sep 17, 2001 — Jirí Menzel’s war comedy is an absurdist symphony of self-absorption and impotence.