The Criterion Collection
Jan 5, 2016 — Toshiya Fujita’s two-film saga set exuberant, manga-inspired martial-arts choreography against a backdrop of a Japanese society in transition to unfold a vivid tale of epic vengeance.
Essays
Dec 10, 2014 — Social satire, women’s melodrama, queer metaphor, or horror movie? Todd Haynes’s elusive masterpiece is all of these and none of them.
Essays
May 17, 2011 — “There was a strong influence of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal throughout this film,” director Masahiro Shinoda would later remember of his 1964 squid-ink noir Pale Flower, made in the days when his career as a filmmaker and founding figure of...
Dec 7, 2010 — In 1981, it seemed to me that a new era of fantastic cinema was upon us.
Short Takes
Apr 6, 2010 — In “the cinema of flourishes”—as scholar David Bordwell once memorably characterized the long and grand tradition of Japanese filmmaking—few flourish makers have flown so high as Takeo Kimura, longtime Seijun Suzuki collaborator and art director extraordinaire, who died recently at...
Mar 23, 2010 — In myriad inventive ways, Terrence Malick’s philosophical drama shows us how nature and culture are always intertwined.
On the Channel
Sep 18, 2025 — This month’s programs offer a feast of horror, including a John Carpenter retrospective and a collection of the most terrifying films of the 2000s.
On the Channel
May 3, 2018 — Two of the earliest films to depict the bombing of Hiroshima show how politics shapes national mourning.
Jan 13, 2008 — Certainly one of the wildest, most original, and most instinctive movie stars turned auteurs in the Hollywood annals, Cornel Wilde made procedurals of uncivilized survival, in a visual syntax that ranges from comic-strip splat to outright gut punch.
Mar 19, 2026 — To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the invention of VHS, the director and the editor of Videoheaven discuss how this game-changing format shaped their lives and imaginations and left a seismic impact on the film industry.