The Criterion Collection
Jun 18, 2019 — In his idiosyncratic, award-winning second film, Bruno Dumont uses the story of an alienated police detective to investigate the most elemental aspects of human experience.
The Daily
May 17, 2019 — Moving from the merely unsettling to the outright bloody, the Brazilian directors come down hard on their new government.
Sneak Peeks
May 16, 2019 — One of the key ways that Michael Haneke ropes viewers into Funny Games, his relentless, provocative psychological thriller about a brutal home invasion, is by regularly breaching the fourth wall. In the 1997 film, two high-spirited young men in tennis...
May 13, 2019 — One Scene The Piano Teacher is one of my favorite films, and a rare novelistic adaptation that doesn’t suffer from comparison with its source material. This is especially impressive given how good a source it has: Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel...
Apr 17, 2019 — Dark Passages The old saying that there are no small parts, only small actors, has surely caused thespians of all sizes to roll their eyes and gnash their teeth. But there are performances that stick in the mind forever with...
Feb 11, 2019 — Renowned as an actors’ filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman directed some of cinema’s greatest performances, many of them by a highly talented troupe of frequent collaborators, including Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, and others. But even amid the...
Jan 22, 2019 — Elaine May is a writer and filmmaker and actor and improviser, but beyond that, she is an artist whose career-long quest for truth has driven her to create work that has taken many forms but always sought to cast aside...
The Daily
Jan 9, 2019 — The Sopranos Film Festival celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the landmark show. Plus news from Rotterdam, Berlin, Austin, and Park City.
Essays
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...
Dec 11, 2018 — Note: The terms black and white were part of the way racial categories were referred to in South Africa under apartheid. Other terms, like nonwhite and non-European, were also used to mark racial segregation. In the following essay, the term...