The Criterion Collection
Jan 17, 2023 — One of contemporary cinema’s most provocative filmmakers launched his career with three deeply unnerving, deliriously genre-blending portraits of Europe.
Oct 26, 2022 — Deep Dives Every elliptical pleasure of Michael Laughlin’s Strange Behavior (a.k.a. Dead Kids, 1981)—the flattened post–Twilight Zone affect, the tableaux evoking Technicolor footage faded like old Polaroids, a host of cross-pollinated genre kinks—suggests outmoded code that’s been surreptitiously updated. Embracing...
Jun 28, 2022 — Boasting a larger-than-life Divine, John Waters’ underground classic finds the sublime in the ridiculous.
Feb 5, 2020 — Performances Judy Davis chomps softly into Naked Lunch: into twisted behavior, into the nuanced meat of the moment, into the juicy black center of the psychic abyss. Bombed-out but supernally alert and incongruously amused, she injects a syringe into her...
Dec 20, 2017 — Amid the tumultuous family dynamics on display in Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale, Emmanuelle Devos delivers a performance of remarkable subtlety and lyricism.
Jun 6, 2017 — Combining sardonic humor with poignant characterizations, this cult comedy explores the discontents of two high-school graduates adrift in strip-mall America.
Dec 26, 2016 — PerformancesTraveling through the subterranean portals of Videodrome like an introverted wraith, Deborah Harry carries herself with the wry, burned-out, but still titillated instincts of a voyager buying a one-way ticket for the outer limits. A vivid, smallish part can either...
Essays
Nov 22, 2016 — The result of a notoriously troubled production, Marlon Brando’s unorthodox western presents a brooding vision of human futility.
Mar 15, 2016 — Set during the height of McCarthy-era paranoia and arriving in 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Frankenheimer’s high-anxiety Communist conspiracy thriller tapped into the darkest fears of Cold War America.
Feb 16, 2016 — In Death by Hanging, Nagisa Oshima spins a complex aesthetic web around his documentary-like structure, packing detail, history, politics, and emotion into his surrealist inquiry into capital punishment.