The Theme

Nov 4, 2025 — The director of La commune and The War Game shook up viewers with dramatizations historical conflicts and imminent futures.

May 13, 2025 — In this masterpiece of lived-in ethical complexity and high spiritual stakes, Abbas Kiarostami explores the tensions between provinciality and modernity, and between artists and their subjects.

Apr 16, 2025 — The two Cannes sidebars select films by Christian Petzold, Robin Campillo, Eva Victor, and Sophie Letourneur.

Feb 28, 2025 — We’ve gathered some of the best writing on each of the nominees for Best Picture Oscar.

Jun 25, 2024 — A collection on the Criterion Channel charts the evolution of the synthesizer—from its infancy in the 1950s to its maturity in the 1980s—and its transformative impact on film music.

May 10, 2024 — Horace Ové’s Pressure opens, Víctor Erice and Pedro Costa exchange ideas, and GQ presents an oral history of Go.

Jan 10, 2024 — The twentieth edition of MoMA’s festival of film preservation features classics and fresh discoveries from around the world.

Oct 12, 2023 — The director completes her “trilogy on Italian identity” by offering an outsider’s point of view.

Feb 7, 2023 — One of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s closest collaborators, the Polish composer suffuses the quotidian images that appear throughout Blue, White, and Red with deep poetry and sacred meaning.

Dec 29, 2022 — From deeply researched surveys of great filmmakers’ careers to idiosyncratic takes on under-examined corners of cinema history, the writing we published this year offered an array of entry points into the art form we all love.