Life in a Day

Oct 19, 2010 — Clock­ing in at three hours and twenty-seven minutes, Seven Samurai’s lengthy runtime underscores the endurance of the samurai lifestyle, its toils and struggles.

Jun 1, 2016 — The Moviegoer, a biweekly online column published by the Library of America, has been a locus of terrific writing about classic literature-inspired films since it launched in February. Curated by film critic Michael Sragow, the column features a roster of...

Oct 15, 2009 — Whatever Tom Waits is up to—be it music or acting (Down by Law, Short Cuts)—is bound to be interesting, so we can’t wait to see him in the role of a lifetime, as the devil in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,...

May 30, 2023 — What makes Thelma & Louise truly a film for women, despite the fact that it was directed by a man, are its stars, Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, who imbue their iconic performances with tender, unwavering specificity.

Nov 21, 2022 — Straub and his life and filmmaking partner Danièle Huillet have been described as “cinema’s conscience.”

Jul 1, 2022 — Both crowd-pleasing and gleefully subversive, Blake Edwards’s 1982 hit Victor/Victoria remains one of the few Hollywood musicals that explicitly depicts queer life.

Jan 14, 2021 — Herman Mankiewicz—a washed-up Hollywood screenwriter writing the first draft of Orson Welles’s 1941 biopic about William Randolph Hearst—may seem an unlikely hero for a 2020 biopic. He is rarely remembered today outside of cinephile circles, but in telling his story,...

Jan 10, 2018 — The director of the war masterpiece Come and See got his start lampooning social conformity in 1960s Soviet life. Two of his early-career gems are now available on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck.

Sep 14, 2015 — It is a sad day at Janus Films and the Criterion Collection, as we lost our cofounder, William Becker, on Saturday. This New York Times obituary is a fitting celebration of the life of this extraordinary man, a great lover...

Dec 19, 2013 — It’s the most wonderful time of the year! But you wouldn’t know it from all of the melancholy Christmas films that have been made over the years. In this video essay, we investigate the longstanding tradition of bleak midwinters at...