The Criterion Collection
Mar 1, 2019 — Claire Simon begins her new documentary The Competition with a shot of young filmmakers chatting outside the locked gates of La Fémis, the most prestigious film school in France, patiently awaiting an opportunity to be judged by a panel of...
Jan 14, 2019 — Songbook “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” could have had many lives before the life it eventually had. But the song had to work hard to be recorded at all. No one particularly wanted to sing it, and it was turned...
Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...
Sep 7, 2018 — F ew filmographies encapsulate the rebellious spirit of American cinema in the seventies better than that of Hal Ashby, who crafted an astonishing string of movies that stretched across the span of the decade. Finding success as an editor early...
Jul 24, 2018 — A feast of sumptuous color and cinematic imagination, Powell and Pressburger’s postwar masterpiece is also a powerful reckoning with recent history.
Essays
Jul 2, 2018 — Josef von Sternberg may have been one of cinema’s original micromanagers, but his films are testaments to longstanding collaborations with brilliant artists and technicians.
Jun 13, 2018 — Can a screenwriter influence—even change—the course of film history? With his script for Rashomon (1950), Shinobu Hashimoto, who turned 100 this year, did just that. The film launched its director—Akira Kurosawa—to world fame and brought international audiences to the glory...
Short Takes
Jun 8, 2018 — On a rainy Saturday in May that called to mind the foggy Pacific Northwest atmospheres of Twin Peaks, a crowd gathered at the music venue Brooklyn Steel for a journey through the world of David Lynch. Celebrating its third annual...
May 21, 2018 — Beyond the Hills (2012) tells the story of a real-life Romanian tragedy that attracted international media attention in 2005: the death of a young woman submitted to a shockingly medieval exorcism at a small monastery in Moldavia. The monastery was...
The Daily
Apr 20, 2018 — Let’s catch up with the new issue of cléo journal, this one dedicated entirely to the work of Agnès Varda. When the journal launched five years ago, it took its name from Varda’s 1962 classic, Cléo from 5 to 7....