The Stranger

Aug 9, 2022 — An indie pioneer whose life was cut tragically short, the Texas filmmaker found grace in the tedium of repressive small-town existence.

Mar 29, 2021 — Channel Calendars Next month, the Criterion Channel ups the ante with a collection of some of the greatest films ever made about the pulse-racing highs and gutter-dwelling lows of gambling. We’re also dealing out the Marx Brothers’ anarchic comedies, sublime...

Feb 22, 2018 — Bengali cinema icon Uttam Kumar stars as a matinee idol on the brink of failure in this deeply introspective meditation on art and fame.

Jan 22, 2018 — Today, we celebrate Jim Jarmusch’s birthday with a look back at some of the writing we’ve published on his films over the years.

Mar 15, 2016 — Set during the height of McCarthy-era paranoia and arriving in 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Frankenheimer’s high-anxiety Communist conspiracy thriller tapped into the darkest fears of Cold War America.

Apr 23, 2013 — Who is Pierre Etaix and where has he been all your life? This is the story of a filmmaker who was vanished, banished, skipped over. It’s as if one of those invisible cubicles mimes are always getting themselves shut in...

Apr 25, 2012 — Pearls of the Deep: Alumni AssociationIn the mid-1960s, there was a brief window during which a remarkable cinema of ideas and visual experimentation flourished in Communist Czechoslovakia. This fecund period lasted approximately five years, from 1963 to 1968, when it...

Dec 9, 1985 — Movie thrillers may come and go, but after half a century, Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps still reigns supreme. And not only for the sheer, breathless excitement of the story; the seamless construction; the chilling, beautifully realized atmosphere; and the...

Dec 8, 2017 — “We live in an age in which articles are written daily on the need for ‘checking out’ of online culture, so that we may disconnect from the bombardment of grotesqueries that keep us in an emotional tailspin,” writes Chuck Bowen,...

Nov 6, 2017 — “One of the disorientations of where we’re at—the obliterative sucking splotch of a present tense in which we now all live—is that it feels simultaneously like a malign mischance and like something we should have seen coming a mile off,”...