Look for a Star

Jul 6, 2017 — Our very first DVD edition, Jean Renoir’s masterpiece Grand Illusion, streams on the Criterion Channel in celebration of the film’s eightieth anniversary.

Jun 21, 2017 — Those lists of twenty-five best films of the twenty-first century (so far) keep coming, and J. Hoberman’s now posted his, too. He’s customized the rules somewhat, and we can be glad: “My single ‘best’ film-object”—Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010)—“is followed...

Jun 15, 2017 — New York. “Among the most savage and surreal of Italian comedies, starring one of the country’s biggest stars”—Alberto Sordi—“and directed by one of its legendary filmmakers, Vittorio De Sica’s Il Boom barely made a ripple when first released, in 1963,...

Jul 21, 2011 — Performances When people talk about Mike Leigh’s Naked, the conversation is inevitably focused on David Thewlis’s nerve-shredding, tour de force central performance as the callous drifter Johnny, who slices through life like a straight razor. Yet consider how impossible his...

Sep 15, 2009 — Words are the trained fleas in David Mamet’s sidewalk circus—dirty words, often bloodstained, usually swarming, that perform their acrobatic stunts for gawkers who will likely get their pockets picked. That’s the reputation, anyhow. More than thirty years after he made...

Dec 6, 2007 — It’s been one of those weeks. First we learned we’d made a mastering error on our Mala Noche edition. Then the first run of the new collectors’ set Ingmar Bergman: Four Masterworks shipped with the wrong disc—the Essential Art House:...

Jan 16, 2007 — The marvel of Mouchette inheres in the elegance, obstinacy, and capaciousness of Bresson’s double-mindedness.

Jul 19, 2004 — In Yasujiro Ozu’s hands, the extended-family drama widened its focus to encompass friends, neighbors, and employers.

Feb 14, 2002 — Robert Bresson’s second feature is fixed in history as one of the movies that heralded an austere, modernistic way of seeing and feeling.

Mar 24, 2025 — A series coprogrammed by Bonjour Tristesse director Durga Chew-Bose “celebrates the beauty and myth of the Riviera.”