The Exam

Feb 5, 2017 — Kirsten Johnson interrogates the thorny ethics of nonfiction filmmaking in her intriguingly elliptical blend of essay, travelogue, and memoir.

Jan 26, 2017 — Over on the Criterion Channel, we’ve premiered our latest installment of Observations on Film Art, an original program that examines elements of cinematic style and how great filmmakers utilize them in their work. Hosted by film-studies scholar Kristin Thompson, this...

Dec 20, 2016 — With only three features under her belt, German director Maren Ade has become one of contemporary cinema’s keenest observers of human behavior.

Dec 19, 2016 — Over on the Criterion Channel, we’re bringing film school into your home with our monthly series Observations on Film Art. Hosted by esteemed film-studies scholars David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Jeff Smith, who recently collaborated on the eleventh edition of...

Dec 15, 2016 — Repertory PicksThis weekend, Jean Renoir’s La chienne will screen at the Trylon microcinema, in Minneapolis, as part of a monthlong series dedicated to the French master’s groundbreaking work in the 1930s. A thematic precursor to The Rules of the Game,...

Nov 18, 2016 — Artists across all mediums have long been obsessed with the challenge of evoking dream states, but film—with its oneiric combinations of light and shadow, and its ability to manipulate time and space—has particularly uncanny access to our nighttime reveries. Whether...

Sep 8, 2016 — Mike Leigh’s 1990 comedy Life Is Sweet, showing at the Trylon microcinema as part of a monthlong retrospective of the director’s early films, presents an intimate portrait of working-class life in Thatcher-era north London.

Jun 30, 2016 — In Olivier Assayas’s 2014 film Clouds of Sils Maria, Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart play out a story centered on the complexities of female relationships, the making and undoing of boundaries between people, and our anxieties about the passage of...

Jun 1, 2016 — With Wrong Move, Wim Wenders made “a movie about the impossibility of moviemaking, a road movie about the uselessness of travel, a literary film about the impossibility of communication.”

May 23, 2016 — “It was just fun,” Robert Downey Sr. says of his early New York filmmaking days, in a new interview with Bilge Ebiri for the Village Voice.