The Protagonists

Aug 24, 2010 — I n a photograph of Josef von Sternberg from 1937, he looks like a character from one of his own films: a turbaned magus with elegantly trimmed beard and mustache, holding a cigarette as he gazes out obliquely, with the...

Oct 2, 2025 — In Wes Anderson’s romantic ode to journalism, the director grapples with the danger and horror inherent in any field of endeavor worth pursuing.

Jul 27, 2022 — Beat the heat with our extensive survey of Chinese representation in American film as well as tributes to Yaphet Kotto, David Gulpilil, and Myrna Loy.

Apr 19, 2019 — In this excerpt from an interview on the edition of Diamonds of the Night, film programmer Irena Kovarova talks about the work of one of director Jan Němec’s key collaborators, Ester Krumbachová.

Sep 24, 2025 — Propelled by outstanding performances from Emmanuelle Devos and Vincent Cassel, Jacques Audiard’s third feature is the rare French crime film built around a complex female character who takes initiative in a male-dominated world.

Sep 20, 2024 — With their virtuosic celebrations of death, giallo films reflect the air of paranoia and fear that haunted Italian society in the 1960s and ’70s, a period when the country was undergoing dramatic, violent changes.

Jun 29, 2021 — In Dee Rees’s ambitious and lyrical debut, the inner life of a queer Black teenager and poet is summoned in all its nuances and contradictions.

Sep 30, 2019 — Critics are enthralled by a mobster’s three-and-a-half-hour alternative history of the mid-twentieth century.

Sep 24, 2018 — Professor David Bordwell breaks down the stunningly innovative thirteen-minute prologue of Alain Resnais’s debut feature in this excerpt from a program on the Criterion Channel.

Jun 18, 2007 — Yasujiro Ozu had already directed forty-five features by the time he started work on Early Spring, in 1955, but the artistic and commercial success of his previous film, Tokyo Story (1953), had rejuvenated him.