To Live

Feb 9, 2010 — You can’t keep a good woman, or a great movie about a good woman, down. By all accounts, goodness in the real Lola Montez reflected the vagaries of character, not talent. She was, as Cosmo Brown says of Lina Lamont...

Oct 19, 2009 — Though known primarily for her wildly varied, continent-hopping features (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, Vanity Fair, The Namesake), Indian director Mira Nair has for the past three decades also been forging a parallel career of short filmmaking. Both fiction (Migration, How...

Jan 21, 2008 — In September 1997, I saw Agnès Varda introduce a brand-new 35 mm print of her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (made in 1954), to an admiring audience at Yale University. More astonishing than the luminous black-and-white images was Varda’s...

Aug 14, 2006 — The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career are not Eric Rohmer’s first films. By 1963, he had made several shorts and one feature, Le signe du Lion. Yet these two short works—with their meticulously charted Paris locations; their semidocumentary...

May 9, 2005 — This seminal documentary conveys the particular seductiveness and resonance of the dream of going pro for two talented Chicago teenagers.

Jun 7, 1999 — From the moment of its first appearance, at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959—where it won the Palme d’Or—it was clear that Black Orpheus was a very special film. Taking the ancient Greek myth of a youth who travels to...

May 24, 1999 — Before The Red Shoes, there were films with dance numbers. After it, there was a new medium which combined dance, design, and music in a dreamlike spectacle. Hollywood musicals were quick to pay tribute—An American in Paris was the most...

Nov 30, 1991 — Starring Jack Nicholson and Candice Bergen, Mike Nichols’s provocative drama is about sex without relationships and eroticism.

Mar 17, 2011 — Bill Hader is a Saturday Night Live cast member and has appeared in the films Superbad, Pineapple Express, Adventureland, and Paul, among others. In compiling his top ten Criterion editions, Hader says, “I couldn’t pick ten . . . sorry....

Mar 2, 2010 — If the harrowing, formally daring Hunger, just out in Criterion Blu-ray and DVD editions, left you wanting to deepen your acquaintance with director Steve McQueen’s visceral imagery, you’re in luck, at least if you live in the New York area....