To the Sea

Feb 14, 2050 — No genre is as bound up with America’s conflicted self-image as the western. But despite being rooted in such a historically specific iconography, the genre has proven adaptable to a wide array of international settings, its influence creeping into the...

Apr 17, 2026 — From a distance—looking down, say, from a penthouse office in a glass-paned downtown skyscraper—the U.S. economy of the 1990s and early 2000s could feel almost boring. Between Black Monday in 1987 and the Global Financial Crisis twenty years later, growth...

Aug 6, 2025 — In November, Criterion’s series of rare films relaunches on Blu-ray with a box set of early works by Abbas Kiarostami.

Jun 17, 2025 — Drawing from over a dozen hours of black-and-white footage, Direct Cinema pioneer Charlotte Zwerin created this elliptical and moving portrait of one of American music’s most original artists.

Aug 28, 2024 — Albert Brooks and Debbie Reynolds are at their comedic best in this tale of parent-child bonding filled with Oedipal humor and emotional insight.

Oct 19, 2023 — Her entrance in the film is impossible to forget. She swings into the scene to serve a patron some coffee, holding a cup in one hand and a book in the other. Her diamond-shaped face is obscured, but her aura...

Aug 15, 2023 — Wayne Wang is perhaps best known as a cinematic chameleon. Working both inside and outside of the Hollywood ecosystem, he has consistently demonstrated a restless curiosity about a wide range of cultures and filmic traditions. In addition to directing two...

Oct 26, 2022 — Deep Dives Every elliptical pleasure of Michael Laughlin’s Strange Behavior (a.k.a. Dead Kids, 1981)—the flattened post–Twilight Zone affect, the tableaux evoking Technicolor footage faded like old Polaroids, a host of cross-pollinated genre kinks—suggests outmoded code that’s been surreptitiously updated. Embracing...

Jul 13, 2022 — Stylistically informed by film noir, Martin Scorsese’s searing drama plumbs male violence and rage through a boxing champ’s self-destruction.