Isn’t Life Wonderful

Apr 21, 2017 — George Stevens’s Oscar-winning comedy captures the first sparks of attraction that ignited one of the great on- and offscreen romances in Hollywood history.

Oct 26, 2016 — The tropes of light comedy give way to a Kafkaesque nightmare in this incendiary critique of moral rot in Franco-era Spain.

Jun 21, 2012 — The following interview with actor Ruth Gordon originally appeared in the April 4, 1971, edition of the New York Times. “Have ya gotta angle for the story?” The accent—part New England hayseed, part Dead-End Kid—is unmistakable. It belongs to Ruth...

Sep 27, 2011 — Internationally, Victor Sjöström is best known for his performance as Professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). But behind that unforgettable face of old age is a younger man, a leading actor who was also the greatest Swedish...

Jan 26, 2010 — Today, most people’s knowledge of George Bernard Shaw doesn’t extend much further than his classic comedy Pygmalion. But the legendary playwright and theater critic (1856–1950) wrote more than sixty plays. In February, we at the Criterion Collection will do our part...

Sep 22, 2025 — The director of the documentary Celluloid Underground discusses his life as a curator, Iranian film culture, and the inherent ephemerality of cinema.

Apr 19, 2021 — What lies beyond the grave? Human cultures across space and time have imagined many kinds of afterlives, from the attenuated shades of Hades to the lush paradise of the Islamic Jannah to the merger with the infinite anticipated by mystics....

Oct 16, 2017 — J. Hoberman will be at Light Industry in New York tomorrow evening to introduce a program of films he’s calling Against Riefenstahl: Charles A. Ridley’s The Lambeth Walk (1940), Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak’s Why We Fight: The Nazis Strike...

Nov 26, 2024 — In this tragicomic road movie about a Bible-selling con man and his precocious young charge, Peter Bogdanovich brings Depression-era America to vivid life without sentimentality or nostalgia.

Oct 1, 2017 — “Sean Baker follows his 2015 breakout feature Tangerine with another high-energy movie about people whose imaginations are undaunted by living on the margins,” begins Amy Taubin, introducing her interview with the director for Film Comment. “In The Florida Project, six-year-old...