Way Out West

Feb 9, 2024 — We’re taking Black History Month viewing recommendations, listening to Peter Bogdanovich’s podcast, and reading about London critics’ favorites.

Sep 9, 2019 — In his thought-provoking latest book, the critic and frequent Criterion contributor traces the complex ways European filmmakers have grappled with the influences of Christianity and modernity.

Feb 27, 2018 — Director Tony Richardson refracts the bawdy spirit of the 1960s through this brilliantly distilled take on an eighteenth-century picaresque.

Sep 30, 2017 — “Nine years in the making, Western draws its title from [Valeska] Grisebach’s generic source inspiration, the American Western,” wrote Michael J. Anderson in a dispatch back to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art a couple of weeks ago. “Noted for...

Apr 16, 2007 — Jules Dassin’s noir is arguably the meatiest and most resonant prison film ever made in Hollywood, drawing explicit parallels to the Nazi encampment experience.

May 14, 2024 — Few filmmakers had a greater impact on the shape and direction of American cinema in the 1960s and ’70s.

Aug 17, 2021 — Songbook It will always figure for me as an interval of eerily suspended time: not only a formative moviegoing experience but a jolt of awareness when the line between screen and life dissolved. In a dimly lit Tokyo cabaret the...

Aug 14, 2019 — There is a scene in Henry King’s State Fair (1933) that ranks among the most poetic moments in all of 1930s American cinema. There is not much to it, just a family driving through the dusk in their rattling pickup...

May 7, 2019 — “The emotion and conflict between two people in a drawing room can be as exciting as a gun battle, and possibly more exciting,” wrote William Wyler on the release of his film The Heiress in 1949. This tenet is fully borne out...

Jan 19, 2018 — Two marvels of midcentury social commentary now streaming on the Criterion Channel show how progress can be a one-step-forward, two-steps-backward process.