The Room

Aug 14, 2020 — Appreciations of Kathleen Collins and Vittorio De Sica and interviews with James Mangold, Orson Welles, and Billy Wilder are among this week’s highlights.

Jul 16, 2020 — This month’s round features reviews of books on Jacques Tati, Kelly Reichardt, Terrence Malick, Jordan Peele, and many more.

May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...

Jan 24, 2020 — In 2017, writer-director Paul Schrader was enjoying one of the peaks of his storied career with the release of First Reformed, a deeply unnerving drama that grapples with his perennial themes of sin, guilt, and faith. During the production of...

Jan 10, 2020 — How many times, in cultural history, has surrealism been declared out for the count? For the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing in 1929, surveying the surrealist literature of André Breton, Robert Desnos, and Louis Aragon, the glory days of this...

Jun 27, 2019 — Sergei Bondarchuk pulled out all the stops to bring Tolstoy’s sprawling vision to the screen, and the result remains one of the most extravagant epic films of all time.

Jun 18, 2019 — In his idiosyncratic, award-winning second film, Bruno Dumont uses the story of an alienated police detective to investigate the most elemental aspects of human experience.

Apr 18, 2019 — This year promises a healthy mix of renowned auteurs and younger talents—and there’s more to come.

Apr 8, 2019 — We just launched the new Criterion Channel today, and we’re hitting the ground running with a lineup of outstanding film noirs produced by Columbia Pictures between the midforties and the early sixties, after the company had risen from its humble...

Feb 1, 2019 — A cast of dolls and a rhino are featured in this year’s award-winners, and Steven Soderbergh has previewed his new film.