The Criterion Collection
May 25, 2021 — In Edmund Goulding’s gritty cult classic, Tyrone Power casts off his matinee-idol image to play a conniving carnival barker on the flipside of the American dream.
Jun 10, 2020 — Years ago I took a seminar on movie stars led by the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, a glittering episode that closed out a rather colorless stint in graduate school. The syllabus was replete with inspired double bills—Deleuze on Leibniz + Lana...
Essays
Mar 21, 2019 — “The world is full of skeptics,” Detour’s Al Roberts struggles to explain, in voice-over, while on-screen we’re pondering Vera’s dead body. “I know. I’m one myself . . .”Even now, closing in on seventy-five years after the Producers Releasing Corporation...
Dec 28, 2018 — Ulysses S. Jenkins’s Two-Zone Transfer By this time in December, the usual onslaught of critics’ polls and nomination lists has given movie lovers a feeling of consensus about what was unmissable over the past twelve months. We were curious about...
The Daily
Jan 28, 2018 — The Sundance Film Festival has presented this year’s round of awards, and on that page you’ll find the descriptions that have tagged along with each title since the day it was announced as part of the lineup. Below, you’ll find...
The Daily
Oct 2, 2017 — Vulture has polled more than forty working screenwriters—their names and credits are listed—to come up with an annotated list of the “100 Best Screenwriters of All Time.” David Edelstein’s written the entry on the legend who’s landed at the top,...
The Daily
Aug 24, 2017 — Cineaste has posted selections from its fiftieth anniversary issue, along with a round of web exclusives. Louis Menashe, professor emeritus at Polytechnic Institute of New York University and author of Moscow Believes in Tears: Russians and Their Movies, tells the...
The Daily
Aug 19, 2017 — “So about Logan Lucky: I knew in the first shot that I was going to love this movie,” Amy Taubin tells Steven Soderbergh during her interview with him for Film Comment. “I call it the three-shot rule,” says Soderbergh. “After...
Aug 5, 2017 — “Two gloriously muscled bodybuilders eye each other with distrust, envy and contempt at the gym in Denis Côte’s A Soft the Skin.” That’s one of the moments from the first days of this year’s Locarno Festival that has stuck with...
The Daily
May 17, 2017 — Welcome to the first entry of the Daily at the Criterion Collection. For those of you who don’t know me, since 2003 I’ve been gathering links to essential—or simply fun—reading, news stories, and items of interest into a sort of...