This Is Not a Film

Nov 11, 2019 — Dark Passages I. Vacancy All the rooms are the same. There is always a skeletal bedstead with an uninviting mattress; a scuffed chest of drawers; a grimy little sink; a naked light bulb; bare walls on which the memory of...

Jul 25, 2019 — My first three films—Angela, Personal Velocity, and The Ballad of Jack and Rose—are all mysteries of female identity, how it can be warped, destroyed, or saved, particularly in the context of family and sexual love. These films are highly charged...

Apr 5, 2019 — Two-Lane Blacktop A longtime Criterion contributor, Kent Jones has written for us on everything from the glories of studio filmmaking to the most daring and cerebral of art-house auteurs. But regardless of the subject he’s set his sights on, he’s...

Jan 15, 2019 — In Notorious (1946), love assumes different shapes and presentations—as a wound, a weapon, a promise, a curse. For Ingrid Bergman as the lusciously complex and raw-nerved Alicia Huberman, it’s all these things. As the film begins, Alicia is on the...

Oct 1, 2018 — On Roberto Minervini’s What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? and Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana.

Jul 30, 2018 — Retrospectives of the French master’s work are playing in New York and Berkeley, with Washington to follow in September.

Apr 5, 2018 — Variety’s Elsa Keslassy broke the story yesterday, and now the Cannes Film Festival has confirmed it: Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows with Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem will open the seventy-first edition on May 8. Shot “in Spanish on the Iberian...

Apr 5, 2018 — Locarno in Los Angeles, the series curated by Acropolis Cinema founder Jordan Cronk and co-artistic director Robert Koehler that brings a batch of the best films screened last summer at the increasingly vital Swiss festival, opens today and runs through...

Mar 27, 2018 — At the height of his career, Ken Russell brought D. H. Lawrence’s classic exploration of human sexuality to the screen with frank eroticism and visual panache.

Feb 12, 2018 — In “Twin Peaks: The Return, or What Isn’t Cinema?,” a four-part essay at Reverse Shot, Nick Pinkerton first stakes out a position. Referring to one of Marcel Duchamp’s most famous pieces, he writes: “For a hundred years now it’s been...