After the Wedding

Feb 11, 2008 — Though today he is most fondly remembered for his later romantic comedies, typifying Hollywood filmmaking in its heyday, it should be known that Ernst Lubitsch was also a pioneer of the modern movie musical.

May 22, 2006 — Luis Buñuel’s merciless satire concerns the smallness of our vision of progress and our narrow attempts to achieve it through rational or moralistic planning.

Jun 20, 2025 — Back on screens: Uli Edel, Charles Burnett, Jane Austen, Mikio Naruse, and Hiroshi Shimizu.

Jul 10, 2023 — Writer-archivist-filmmaker Jenni Olson and critic Caden Mark Gardner discuss Masc, a collection of films on the Criterion Channel that explores the many forms of masculinity beyond the realm of cisgender men.

Nov 19, 2020 — For most of my life, makeover sequences in film comedies held an irresistible allure. The mousy young woman who realizes her own inner and outer (but mostly outer) beauty after receiving the attentions of the right man (or the right...

Jul 21, 2020 — Consider this an afterword to Taste of Cherry (1997), the feature that brought its director, Abbas Kiarostami, to full international prominence, after it became the first Iranian movie to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (where it...

May 18, 2020 — It’s hard to imagine Hollywood without Frances Marion. The story of the screenwriter’s career is entwined with the story of Hollywood itself, from its pioneer days to the Golden Age. Part of Marion’s skill as a writer was how her...

May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...

Apr 9, 2018 — Ingrid Bergman’s work in her native Sweden was an early showcase for her dazzlingly precocious talent and emotional depth.

Mar 30, 2018 — This spectacular and technically ambitious Hollywood musical is a priceless window onto American pop culture’s view of itself in the 1930s.