The Master

May 3, 2016 — Last night, HBO premiered British filmmaker Adam Benzine’s Oscar-nominated documentary Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah. In interviews and dug-up footage, Benzine’s film traces the twelve-year production of Shoah, Lanzmann’s groundbreaking nine-hour 1985 Holocaust documentary. Shoah, which eschewed archival images...

May 17, 2011 — “There was a strong influence of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal throughout this film,” director Masahiro Shinoda would later remember of his 1964 squid-ink noir Pale Flower, made in the days when his career as a filmmaker and founding figure of...

Nov 11, 2008 — Groundbreaking modernist artist Paul Strand (1890–1976) might have been better known for his photography than his filmmaking, but the two films he directed are both extraordinary testaments to his brilliance. The first, his silent 1921 avant-garde masterpiece Manhatta, a luminous...

Jul 21, 2008 — Akira Kurosawa’s modern adaptation of an American thriller represents a departure from his usual themes and stylistic choices.

Oct 4, 2011 — No film better illustrates Pier Paolo Pasolini’s challenge to conventional representations, to the social and cultural consensus, than his 1976 masterwork.

Apr 29, 2016 — This July brings two new Criterion releases in the United Kingdom: Stanley Kubrick’s satirical Cold War masterpiece Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Howard Brookner’s Burroughs: The Movie.

Oct 8, 2024 — An otherworldly exploration of the realm between life and death, this horror masterpiece transcends its genre with its poetic, often unsettling use of fragmentation and discontinuity.

Jul 18, 2017 — During a period of personal turmoil, Andrei Tarkovsky created this enigmatic masterpiece, which explores spiritual and metaphysical mysteries through the prism of a science-fiction epic.

The director of The Tin Drum and Young Törless says a prayer to the spirits of the closet and makes a beeline for a masterpiece by Michelangelo Antonioni.

The philosopher names Trouble in Paradise “Ernst Lubitsch’s ultimate masterpiece,” praises Peter Weir’s early films, and calls the final scene of City Lights “the most sublime ending.”