Life in a Year

Aug 31, 2011 — Let there be no trouble, no pranks . . . Do you realize the enormity of our moral responsibility? —Headmaster in Zéro de conduite There is nothing in the history of movies that mirrors or matches the achievement of Jean...

Nov 25, 2010 — Five Easy Pieces is not a statement about America but a closely observed report. Or, perhaps, a confession.

Jul 19, 2010 — “It is the most erotic film that I have ever made,” wrote Michael Powell of Black Narcissus. “It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image, from the beginning to the end.”

Nov 30, 2009 — The following essay was originally written for Criterion’s website in 2005, on the occasion of the DVD release of Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann. We have posted it here to coincide with BFI Southbank’s ongoing Hein Heckroth exhibition...

Nov 3, 2009 — If ever there was a European art film that could be all things to all people, it’s Wim Wenders’s 1987 masterpiece.

Jan 21, 2008 — Agnès Varda seizes the kind of immediacy and tension associated, at the start of the sixties, with the cinema verité documentary movement and uses it to create a new form of fiction.

Oct 6, 2007 — In Gus Van Sant’s first feature, gayness—blind, unembarrassed homosexual lust—is the narrative’s driving force.

Apr 27, 2026 — During the evening rush on a busy Los Angeles boulevard, a man steps into a news-vendor’s stall and scans the out-of-town papers section, where journals offer balm for homesick travelers and transplants. But his hometown, Evanston, Illinois, is missing—no call...

Apr 3, 2026 — This week: Mani Haghighi, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sophy Romvari and Martha Coolidge, and Ken and Flo Jacobs.

Jan 9, 2026 — The director of some of the bleakest films ever made once claimed all they were all comedies—except one.