Performance.

Jun 12, 2014 — The colors, the lighting, the camera angles and movements, the performances, the music! This gorgeous clip from our new digitial restoration of All That Heaven Allows perfectly encapsulates the all-encompassing style of director Douglas Sirk, who employed the conventions of...

Jun 10, 2014 — Douglas Sirk once said: “This is the dialectic—there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” When All That Heaven Allows was...

Jun 9, 2014 — Your vigilance as an artist is an amorous vigilance, a vigilance of desire.—Roland Barthes to Michelangelo Antonioni, 1979 It’s lamentable that Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the most fashionable vanguard European filmmakers during the sixties, has mainly been out of fashion...

May 5, 2014 — Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against...

Apr 21, 2014 — A real-life prison uprising inspired this two-fisted tale directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to make many more films about men in extreme situations.

Apr 14, 2014 — Lars von Trier brought his brand of provocation to his widest audience yet with this inquiry into faith and human goodness.

Mar 18, 2014 — In addition to technical brilliance and a humanist message, Akira Kurosawa’s adventure features one of the director’s strongest female characters.

Mar 13, 2014 — David Gordon Green’s George Washington makes cinematic poetry out of the tricky art of voice-over narration. In this excerpt from our special edition’s commentary track, writer-director Green and actor Paul Schneider discuss the earthy beauty that fourteen-year-old Candace Evanofski brings...

Dec 12, 2013 — Repertory PicksElia Kazan’s On the Waterfront is the kind of movie one might call the whole package: gripping storytelling, evocative cinematography that captures a sense of time and place, a sensational score, and, of course, amazing performances, topped by an...

Nov 29, 2013 — Did You See This?• Living Criterion covers • A lengthy detour with Edgar Ulmer • Re-creating Babette’s feast • Eleven great (mini) performances • A gateway cinema survey • Steve James to honor Roger Ebert on film • Mike Leigh...