The Criterion Collection
Aug 28, 2020 — One severe pan, a good handful of raves, and a set of fence-straddling reviews recommending that viewers go ahead and proceed—but with caution.
Essays
Aug 11, 2020 — The Complete Films of Agnès Varda It’s the other famous shot in The Gleaners and I (2000) of Agnès Varda’s reaching hands. Not the one she said was taught around the world as the heart of her documentary-making, where, in...
Interviews
Jul 28, 2020 — The films of Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda are graceful meditations on memory and the inextricable connections that bind our lives together. Whether transporting us to a way station in the afterlife or into a household in crisis, his character studies...
Jun 24, 2020 — It was audiences, not critics, that made hits out of such movies as St. Elmo’s Fire (1985), Batman Forever (1995), and Phone Booth (2002).
Interviews
Jun 18, 2020 — When Jamie Babbit’s But I’m a Cheerleader made its theatrical premiere in July 2000, it was entering a queer political landscape vastly different from the one we live in today. Over the last two decades, we’ve witnessed the rise of LGBTQ...
Features
May 27, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so commonplace that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. Movies, however, reveal this action as more than just the original mode of getting from here to...
Features
May 22, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so common that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. But when this action appears in a movie, it is revealed as more than the original mode...
Tech Corner
May 14, 2020 — Restoration Spotlight I was just coming of age as a moviegoer when digital video hit the big screens, around the turn of the twenty-first century. At the time, I remember being every bit as entranced by the gritty horror of...
Features
May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...
Features
Apr 3, 2020 — Everyone remembers their first time with Toshiro Mifune. With almost anyone else, such a first would be recollected with a shrug or a casual “it was . . . fine.” But Mifune induces delirious and perfect recall: of him flat...