The Follow

Apr 19, 2022 — Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist fable deploys barbed humor and surreal flourishes to depict class solidarity and human kindness in postwar Italy.

Sep 23, 2021 — Gina Prince-Bythewood’s iconic debut portrays Black love without forcing its heroine to compromise herself and her ambitions.

Mar 9, 2021 — “Oral tradition is a tradition of images. What is said is stronger than what is written; the word addresses itself to the imagination, not the ear. Imagination creates the image and the image creates cinema, so we are in direct...

Mar 24, 2020 — How do you talk about Leave Her to Heaven without talking about Gene Tierney’s face? You can’t. Because its planes and curves, its cunning expressions and its tantalizing opacity, are such a central piece of the movie itself. A series...

Apr 5, 2019 — Two-Lane Blacktop A longtime Criterion contributor, Kent Jones has written for us on everything from the glories of studio filmmaking to the most daring and cerebral of art-house auteurs. But regardless of the subject he’s set his sights on, he’s...

Nov 13, 2018 — Turning to theater for inspiration, Kenji Mizoguchi transformed a popular eighteenth-century play into a spiritually charged meditation on forbidden love and societal oppression.

Feb 23, 2017 — Repertory PicksThe Indiana University Cinema will screen Roberto Rossellini’s 1946 film Paisan on 35 mm this Saturday as part of its ongoing series of twentieth-century masterworks, City Lights. This unsparing depiction of Italy at the end of World War II...

Jan 8, 2013 — The two movies that opened the door to “youth culture” in Hollywood, The Graduate and Easy Rider, were milestones, to be sure. But can it really be said that they were milestones in the art of cinema? “I think The...

Aug 24, 2010 — I n a photograph of Josef von Sternberg from 1937, he looks like a character from one of his own films: a turbaned magus with elegantly trimmed beard and mustache, holding a cigarette as he gazes out obliquely, with the...

Mar 16, 2010 — More than a decade after his death in 1997, the moment is right for the rediscovery of the work of Marco Ferreri. “I think he’s modern. More than modern, in fact,” frequent collaborator Marcello Mastroianni once remarked, encapsulating how far...