† This is the Life

Mar 25, 2025 — Unfettered by the precepts of bourgeois morality and the nuclear family, the characters in Alan Rudolph’s romantic drama struggle to find happiness as they navigate love’s whims and ambiguities.

Aug 22, 2024 — This year, Bologna’s annual feast of restorations and rediscoveries showcased one of the most ambitious masterpieces of the silent era, the melodramas of Japanese filmmaker Kozaburo Yoshimura, and other treasures of film history.

May 9, 2024 — With his new film slated to premiere in Cannes, Rasoulof faces his harshest sentence yet.

Mar 13, 2024 — The subject of a revelatory retrospective at last year’s Morelia International Film Festival, this groundbreaking director ushered in Mexican cinema’s golden age with vibrant explorations of the nation’s folk traditions and revolutionary past.

Aug 10, 2023 — “You’re the company I waited so long for,” Dr. Rosetta Stone (Tilda Swinton) says to her three Self Replicating Automatons in Teknolust (2002), artist Lynn Hershman Leeson’s sci-fi farce about a scientist’s well-meaning pursuit of artificial life. Stone’s color-coded clones...

Jul 10, 2023 — Writer-archivist-filmmaker Jenni Olson and critic Caden Mark Gardner discuss Masc, a collection of films on the Criterion Channel that explores the many forms of masculinity beyond the realm of cisgender men.

Nov 2, 2022 — The director of Samson and Delilah and Sweet Country discusses his formative artistic encounters, his eclectic professional background, and on-screen Indigenous representation.

May 18, 2022 — Just slightly northwest of Death Valley, in what is now eastern California, a mountain range carves out the eastern edge of the Owens Valley. Sculpted by bedrock pushed between tectonic faults during the late Proterozoic to Cambrian periods, the Inyo...

Mar 15, 2022 — The story of queerness in American cinema isn’t complete without the unusual case of These Three (1936) and The Children’s Hour (1961). Both films are based on Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play The Children’s Hour, inspired by an incident in which...

Mar 1, 2022 — The first film I saw at last year’s Morelia International Film Festival opens on the image of a freshly dug grave. Shovelfuls of earth fall into the open pit as two doctors stand above it, lamenting the loss of yet...