A Dirty Story

Mar 25, 2025 — Set in a grimy, unglamorous version of Los Angeles, Arthur Penn’s Watergate-era neonoir tells the story of an honorable private eye acutely conscious of living in an era that is the mere shadow of a nobler past.

Dec 10, 2024 — In this brilliant adaptation, Joel and Ethan Coen find a kindred spirit in novelist Cormac McCarthy, whose abiding themes—including destiny, the American West, and the contest between our better natures and our survival instinct—mirror their own.

Jun 24, 2024 — Costars and critics remember an outstanding actor who neither looked nor sounded like a movie star.

May 14, 2024 — Despite the harsh critical drubbing it received upon its release in 1960, Michael Powell’s lurid tale of obsession and violence is now widely regarded as a masterpiece—and as a key inspiration for an entire subgenre of “slasher” movies.

Oct 17, 2022 — Memoirs from Paul Newman and Pierre Clémenti, miscellany from Satyajit Ray and Alan Rickman, and a translation of Marguerite Duras are among this month’s highlights.

Sep 27, 2022 — Darius Marder’s Oscar-nominated drama captures the isolation and despair of a man who suddenly goes deaf and struggles in vain to regain his former life.

Jun 8, 2022 — The Indian director, actor, and producer’s early death has enshrined him as a tragic icon in public memory. But there is more to his art than misery.

Feb 1, 2022 — Douglas Sirk’s 1956 masterpiece is a visceral tragedy that lays bare the spiritual malaise of the ruling class.

Oct 9, 2020 — In Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, veteran French journalist Philippe Garnier brings to life an enchantingly raffish community of typewriter-pounders who headed west to try their luck in the verbal gold rush set off by the...

Jan 3, 2020 — The director of Margaret and Manchester by the Sea celebrates Hollywood’s greatest humanist, whose films are featured in a series now playing on the Criterion Channel.