The Towrope

Apr 8, 2019 — We just launched the new Criterion Channel today, and we’re hitting the ground running with a lineup of outstanding film noirs produced by Columbia Pictures between the midforties and the early sixties, after the company had risen from its humble...

Oct 17, 2017 — In this lavishly mounted epic, Stanley Kubrick captures the ghostly ephemerality of a vanishing world with paradoxical immediacy.

Aug 14, 2006 — The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career are not Eric Rohmer’s first films. By 1963, he had made several shorts and one feature, Le signe du Lion. Yet these two short works—with their meticulously charted Paris locations; their semidocumentary...

Apr 26, 2022 — Bertrand Tavernier was well known as one of the world’s great champions of cinema, in addition to being a great filmmaker himself. He was also a lifelong student and fan of jazz music and had been wanting to make a...

Mar 8, 2024 — This week calls for notes on some of the best writing on each of the ten nominees for Best Picture.

Oct 29, 2021 — A lost Iranian melodrama returns, Reverse Shot and Caligari tell us scary stories, and Robert Mitchum is the star of Noirvember.

Aug 13, 2021 — This week we’re reading about the first and second waves of noir and taking a good look at a smartly dressed man.

Jun 7, 2019 — This week we revisit the work of Pawel Pawlikowski, Carlos Reygadas, Robert Mitchum, Hal Hartley, and Elaine May.

Dec 21, 2016 — Romance has served as the foundation for some of film history’s most significant partnerships. Over at the Criterion Channel, we’re celebrating couples who shared a chemistry both on-screen and in real life with Creative Marriages, a series of double bills...

Jul 22, 2025 — In his achingly beautiful debut feature, Kenneth Lonergan captures the dynamics of a sibling relationship shaped by grief, revealing its complexities with narrative economy and deep emotion.