I Like Movies

May 24, 2016 — In The Player, Robert Altman’s early nineties comeback film, the director brilliantly skewers Hollywood—getting all the details right, as only he could—while constructing his own kind of Hollywood Movie.

May 10, 2016 — Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place imbues the conventions of film noir with a subtle, tense vulnerability that lends a naturalistic weight to the film’s powerful emotional impact.

Apr 29, 2016 — The writer-director of such witty cultural sendups as Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco talks about that early-career trilogy; his new Jane Austen adaptation, Love and Friendship; and the filmmaker’s work of capturing the past.

Apr 27, 2016 — In Phoenix, Christian Petzold sets his nuanced melodrama of postwar German-Jewish identity within a starkly realist aesthetic, making newly fascinating use of his enduring interest in the tensions between the real and the artificial.

Mar 15, 2016 — Set during the height of McCarthy-era paranoia and arriving in 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Frankenheimer’s high-anxiety Communist conspiracy thriller tapped into the darkest fears of Cold War America.

Mar 8, 2016 — Paris Belongs to Us marked the genesis of Jacques Rivette’s unique filmmaking style—introducing visual and narrative elements that Rivette would build on over the course of his long career.

Mar 3, 2016 — By the time Charlie Chaplin began work on what would be his first feature-length film, in 1919, he had been sneaking up to the longer format for some time.

Feb 23, 2016 — Without any overt topical references, Mike Nichols’s The Graduate captured the zeitgeist of the 1960s and the dawning countercultural revolution.

Feb 9, 2016 — Jan Troell’s narration of one Swedish couple’s arduous journey to America portrays the migratory quality of marriage—of “finding that you think of this person who is not you, or this place that is not the land of your birth, as...

Jan 7, 2016 — At the gala for the New York Film Critics Circle’s 2016 awards dinner Criterion president Peter Becker accepted an award on behalf of his father, Criterion cofounder William Becker. His remarks are reproduced here.