Simon of the Desert

Jun 29, 2020 — Channel Calendars This July, the Criterion Channel celebrates unconventional artists who march to the beat of their own drum, with spotlights on indie iconoclast Miranda July, cutting-edge composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, downtown poet Sara Driver, lyrical documentarians Bill and Turner Ross, and formally...

Jun 21, 2016 — Animated in Czechoslovakia amid a Soviet invasion, the French film Fantastic Planet, the third collaboration between René Laloux and Roland Topor, timelessly renders its surreal sci-fi story of captivity and resistance.

Dec 18, 2018 — Half a century before Julien Duvivier made his 1946 film Panique, the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon published his influential study of mob behavior, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, in which he argued that recent upheavals in...

Apr 5, 2023 — The composer, pop star, and occasional actor mastered a bafflingly wide range of styles and influences.

Jul 19, 2004 — Marcel Carné's third feature is as epochal as any film made in France in the 1930s, exemplifying the style known as “poetic realism.”

Dec 10, 2021 — This week sees new issues from New York, Cineaste, Film Quarterly, and the Brooklyn Rail.

Sep 8, 2017 — “A complex and layered work, [Jonas Mekas’s] Lost Lost Lost [1976]—especially its first hour—is among cinema’s most poignant accounts of the immigrant experience,” writes Girish Shambu. “Historically, the best immigration cinema stages, in an astonishing multitude of ways, a divided...

Sep 15, 2008 — Max Ophuls’s 1952 comedy celebrates existence by presenting a world full of unresolvable contradictions.

Jul 13, 2017 — “Martin Scorsese is putting the band back together,” writes Anita Busch, breaking the news at Deadline that “Joe Pesci has officially joined Al Pacino (whose deal is currently being finalized) and Robert De Niro in Scorsese’s Jimmy Hoffa disappearance film...

Aug 11, 2026 — Set in 1930s French West Africa, Bertrand Tavernier’s hard-to-classify adaptation of the Jim Thompson novel Pop. 1280 offers an apocalyptic vision of a society in which institutions have abdicated their moral authority.