The General Line

Aug 28, 2019 — 1. Before he became a filmmaker, D. A. Pennebaker’s ambition was to play stride piano like Fats Waller. “What changed your mind?” I asked him. “Well,” Penny replied, “after I saw Fats play . . . ” Penny would have...

Sep 16, 2024 — Ready or not, the win for Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King adaptation kicks off this year’s awards season.

Apr 13, 2018 — Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov explored his Transcaucasian roots in this visually spectacular and wonderfully strange ode to the Armenian poet Sayat-Nova.

Apr 17, 2017 — A group of Cuba’s most seasoned musicians became an international sensation upon the release of this acclaimed documentary portrait.

Sep 20, 2016 — Cloaked in chiaroscuro and innuendo, this stylistically innovative creature feature leaves its greatest horrors to the imagination.

Jun 25, 2012 — For this Edinburgh-based writer and filmmaker, Hitchcock’s Scottish caper is both fantasy and reality.

Feb 24, 2010 — Major Barbara: Stage to Screen It was one of the most improbable linkups in the history of either theater or cinema—as unlikely as Andrew Undershaft’s turning over his munitions empire to Adolphus Cusins, his not-quite-yet son-in-law (and newly declared “foundling”),...

Aug 18, 2003 — One of the Swedish director’s most representative works, this drama’s portentousness, banked intensity, and recondite symbolism come near to embodying the popular stereotype of the Bergmanesque.

Nov 23, 2021 — The End In the end, it should not have come as any kind of surprise. When Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine’s international poll of...

Jun 25, 2024 — A collection on the Criterion Channel charts the evolution of the synthesizer—from its infancy in the 1950s to its maturity in the 1980s—and its transformative impact on film music.