The Mask

Feb 18, 2020 — In what was no doubt an appeal to subtitle-averse audiences, advertisements for the U.S. release of Teorema (1968) trumpeted, “There are only 923 words spoken in Teorema—but it says everything!” A meager few of those utterances are expended in an...

Oct 21, 2014 — Federico Fellini’s frantic tragicomedy is such a classic it risks being underestimated.

Aug 31, 2011 — City symphony or spa burlesque? Polemic or caprice? From the outset, even in his manifesto lecture “Towards a Social Cinema,” delivered to the Groupement des Spectateurs d’Avant-Garde at Paris’s Le Vieux-Colombier before what was only the second public screening of À propos...

Apr 12, 2011 — With his 1970 gangster epic Le cercle rouge, Jean-Pierre Melville finally landed his white whale.

Aug 24, 2010 — I n a photograph of Josef von Sternberg from 1937, he looks like a character from one of his own films: a turbaned magus with elegantly trimmed beard and mustache, holding a cigarette as he gazes out obliquely, with the...

Sep 3, 2007 — Jim Jarmusch is a difficult director because he works from the frontiers. What does it mean to be a “frontier” director in the film world today?It means a clear refusal, for ethical and aesthetic reasons, to be part of the...

Oct 18, 1994 — It’s useless to take a lofty view on an instant schlock horror classic, but there are reasons why John Carpenter’s Halloween, alone in the last decade, stands with George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and, before that, with...

Aug 30, 2024 — Martin Scorsese and Edgar Wright discuss overlooked British films and cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing talks about working with Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Sep 10, 2019 — The comedic murder mystery in the grand tradition of Agatha Christie has scored an outstanding round of early reviews.

Jul 18, 2016 — Criterion’s resident researcher and web producer takes a trip to Madrid bookstore Ocho y Medio, which she calls “a shrine to Spanish contributions to the seventh art.”