Bits of Life

Aug 2, 2004 — The three film’s in Renoir’s trilogy are comic period fantasies in dazzling color, offering a kind of continuous, bustling choreography in which shifting power relations between upper and lower classes and between spectators and performers literally turn the world into...

Sep 29, 2003 — Fassbinder had long dreamed of a “German Hollywood film.” He sought not only success with the audience, but also professionalism. The auteur film in its purest form is an attempt to abolish the division of labor: the filmmaker represents in...

Sep 29, 2003 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder dedicated his final energies to bringing the lost, gray years of postwar Germany back to life.

Feb 14, 2002 — Robert Bresson’s second feature is fixed in history as one of the movies that heralded an austere, modernistic way of seeing and feeling.

May 15, 2000 — Horror movies take place in their own territory. The trick is to get us there. It doesn’t matter whether they start with fantastic premises and gothic settings, or with ordinary neighborhoods and daily experience, because the places and assumptions change...

Jan 20, 2026 — A smash hit at the box office, this electrifying adventure film established the team of director Michael Curtiz and actors Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland as one of the most iconic creative partnerships in Hollywood.

Jan 9, 2023 — The films in the Criterion Channel collection Free Jazz chronicle the development of a deeply experimental music that has baffled and enthralled listeners in equal measure.

Apr 4, 2022 — Nicholas Ray’s melodrama is both a critique of 1950s America and a straight-up horror movie.

Mar 25, 2022 — With its rambling Victorian mansions and seedy charms, the once-exclusive area of downtown Los Angeles was film noir’s favorite neighborhood.

Feb 15, 2022 — Playful irreverence gives way to tragedy and transcendence in Leo McCarey’s 1939 masterwork, one of the defining romances of the Hollywood studio era.