Leo

The actor describes the beauty of discovering Agnès Varda, shares how Mean Streets inspired his desire to act, and selects all-time favorite films, from Five Easy Pieces to The Leopard.

The Oscar-winning costume designer recalls a memorable screening of Down by Law in Rome and explains what makes the Italian classics Bicycle Thieves and The Leopard so revelatory.

Nov 20, 2008 — In honor of his participation in our release of Louis Malle’s jazzy noir classic Elevator to the Gallows, we invited music critic Gary Giddins to contribute a list of his ten favorite Criterion films. Giddins: "Just ten? Obviously impossible, but...

Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and critic for the New Yorker. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2024 and 2025. His 2024 debut novel, Great Expectations, was a finalist for the National Book Critics...

Terrence Rafferty is the author of The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies. He has written for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Nation, GQ, and Sight and Sound, and taught at Columbia...

Jan 24, 2020 — All six feet two of Burt Lancaster is spread out next to Deborah Kerr as they kiss each other on the beach in From Here to Eternity (1953). This is one of the most famous movie love scenes, parodied and copied many...

Oct 20, 2016 — On the ninety-ninth anniversary of Jean-Pierre Melville’s birth, we’ve gathered a selection of essays, photos, and videos that showcase the best of the iconic director’s varied oeuvre.

Mar 31, 2016 — Since its initial release more than half a century ago, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves has been lauded as one of cinema’s greatest achievements. Loosely adapted from a novel by Luigi Bartolini, the film centers on a father’s quest—with his...

Jul 26, 2011 — To a secular eye, Jean-Pierre Melville’s sixth feature film, Léon Morin, Priest (1961), is about almost anything except religion: the deleterious effects of sexual repression, the moral bleariness of wartime and life under occupation, the harsh inflections of history in...

Aug 2, 2010 — The great, beloved screenwriter Suso Cecchi D’Amico died this past weekend at the age of ninety-six. A longtime collaborator of Luchino Visconti’s (they’re pictured together above), including on the epic The Leopard (1963), Cecchi D’Amico worked with just about every...